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ACTIVISM: Alert!! Protest BuZh in Toronto, Tuesday !!

2009-03-16T02:16:00.001-04:00

An informal teachin in Dundas Square for Tuesday afternoon is proposed!!

In Calgary the time for the BuZh "appearance" is:

Timezone: Canada/Mountain

City:

Calgary, Alberta

Web address:

The People V. Bush

Address:

1 Street SE at 8th Avenue SW, Calgary

Email:

Email Contact Form

Cost:

Free

March 17, 2009 Calgary, Alberta, Canada. For the first time outside USA with no immunity. George W Bush comes to Calgary.

Calgarians are organizing.
They need your help.

What does Bush mean to you?
What will you do?
What will we do together?

Bush Crimes
He has much to answer for

Spread the word far, world-wide and quickly.

Boot Bush!

SHOW UP AT DUNDAS SQUARE and Show the world Toronto doesn't want Bush here either !!

Bring old shoes and chalk.

Impromtu teachin is proposed !!

Torture: interesting NYT editorial today (about time!)

2009-03-16T01:39:00.004-04:00

Op-Ed Contributor

Tales From Torture’s Dark World

By MARK DANNER

Published: March 14, 2009

ON a bright sunny day two years ago, President George W. Bush strode into the East Room of the White House and informed the world that the United States had created a dark and secret universe to hold and interrogate captured terrorists.

“In addition to the terrorists held at Guantánamo,” the president said, “a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war have been held and questioned outside the United States, in a separate program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency.”

At these places, Mr. Bush said, “the C.I.A. used an alternative set of procedures.” He added: “These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful.” This speech will stand, I believe, as George W. Bush’s most important: perhaps the only historic speech he ever gave. In his fervent defense of his government’s “alternative set of procedures” and his equally fervent insistence that they were “lawful,” he set out before the country America’s dark moral epic of torture, in the coils of whose contradictions we find ourselves entangled still.

At the same time, perhaps unwittingly, Mr. Bush made it possible that day for those on whom the alternative set of procedures were performed eventually to speak. For he announced that he would send 14 “high-value detainees” from dark into twilight: they would be transferred from the overseas “black sites” to Guantánamo. There, while awaiting trial, the International Committee of the Red Cross would be “advised of their detention, and will have the opportunity to meet with them.”

A few weeks later, from Oct. 6 to 11 and then from Dec. 4 to 14, 2006, Red Cross officials — whose duty it is to monitor compliance with the Geneva Conventions and to supervise treatment of prisoners of war — traveled to Guantánamo and began interviewing the prisoners.

Their stated goal was to produce a report that would “provide a description of the treatment and material conditions of detention of the 14 during the period they were held in the C.I.A. detention program,” periods ranging “from 16 months to almost four and a half years.”

As the Red Cross interviewers informed the detainees, their report was not intended to be released to the public but, “to the extent that each detainee agreed for it to be transmitted to the authorities,” to be given in strictest secrecy to officials of the government agency that had been in charge of holding them — in this case the Central Intelligence Agency, to whose acting general counsel, John Rizzo, the report was sent on Feb. 14, 2007.

The result is a document — labeled “confidential” and clearly intended only for the eyes of those senior American officials — that tells a story of what happened to each of the 14 detainees inside the black sites.

A short time ago, this document came into my hands and I have set out the stories it tells in a longer article in The New York Review of Books. Because these stories were taken down confidentially in patient interviews by professionals from the International Committee of the Red Cross, and not intended for public consumption, they have an unusual claim to authenticity.

Indeed, since the detainees were kept strictly apart and isolated, both at the black sites and at Guantánamo, the striking similarity in their stories would seem to make fabrication extremely unlikely. As its authors state in their introduction, “The I.C.R.C. wishes to underscore that the consistency of the detailed allegations provided separately by each of the 14 adds particular weight to the information provided below.”

Beginning with the chapter headings on its contents page — “suffocation by water,” “prolonged stress standing,” “beatings by use of a collar,” “confinement in a box” — the document makes compelling and chilling reading. The stories recounted in its fewer than 50 pages lead inexorably to this unequivocal conclusion, which, given its source, has the power of a legal determination: “The allegations of ill treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill treatment to which they were subjected while held in the C.I.A. program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”

•

Perhaps one should start with the story of the first man to whom, according to news reports, the president’s “alternative set of procedures” were applied:

“I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room. The room measured approximately 4 meters by 4 meters. The room had three solid walls, with the fourth wall consisting of metal bars separating it from a larger room. I am not sure how long I remained in the bed. After some time, I think it was several days, but can’t remember exactly, I was transferred to a chair where I was kept, shackled by hands and feet for what I think was the next two to three weeks. During this time I developed blisters on the underside of my legs due to the constant sitting. I was only allowed to get up from the chair to go [to] the toilet, which consisted of a bucket.

“I was given no solid food during the first two or three weeks, while sitting on the chair. I was only given Ensure and water to drink. At first the Ensure made me vomit, but this became less with time.

“The cell and room were air-conditioned and were very cold. Very loud, shouting-type music was constantly playing. It kept repeating about every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day. Sometimes the music stopped and was replaced by a loud hissing or crackling noise.

“The guards were American, but wore masks to conceal their faces. My interrogators did not wear masks.”

So begins the story of Abu Zubaydah, a senior member of Al Qaeda, captured in a raid in Pakistan in March 2002. The arrest of an active terrorist with actionable information was a coup for the United States.

After being treated for his wounds — he had been shot in the stomach, leg and groin during his capture — Abu Zubaydah was brought to one of the black sites, probably in Thailand, and placed in that white room.

It is important to note that Abu Zubaydah was not alone with his interrogators, that everyone in that white room — guards, interrogators, doctor — was in fact linked directly, and almost constantly, to senior intelligence officials on the other side of the world. “It wasn’t up to individual interrogators to decide, ‘Well, I’m going to slap him. Or I’m going to shake him,’” said John Kiriakou, a C.I.A. officer who helped capture Abu Zubaydah, in an interview with ABC News.

Every one of the steps taken with regard to Abu Zubaydah “had to have the approval of the deputy director for operations. So before you laid a hand on him, you had to send in the cable saying, ‘He’s uncooperative. Request permission to do X.’”

He went on: “The cable traffic back and forth was extremely specific.... No one wanted to get in trouble by going overboard.”

Shortly after Abu Zubaydah was captured, C.I.A. officers briefed the National Security Council’s principals committee, including Vice President Dick Cheney, the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, in detail on the interrogation plans for the prisoner. As the interrogations proceeded, so did the briefings, with George Tenet, the C.I.A. director, bringing to senior officials almost daily reports of the techniques applied.

At the time, the spring and summer of 2002, Justice Department officials, led by John Yoo, were working on a memorandum, now known informally as “the torture memo,” which claimed that for an “alternative procedure” to be considered torture, and thus illegal, it would have to cause pain of the sort “that would be associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure, or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body function will likely result.” The memo was approved in August 2002, thus serving as a legal “green light” for interrogators to apply the most aggressive techniques to Abu Zubaydah:

“I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around my neck; they then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against the hard walls of the room.”

The prisoner was then put in a coffin-like black box, about 4 feet by 3 feet and 6 feet high, “for what I think was about one and a half to two hours.” He added: The box was totally black on the inside as well as the outside.... They put a cloth or cover over the outside of the box to cut out the light and restrict my air supply. It was difficult to breathe. When I was let out of the box I saw that one of the walls of the room had been covered with plywood sheeting. From now on it was against this wall that I was then smashed with the towel around my neck. I think that the plywood was put there to provide some absorption of the impact of my body. The interrogators realized that smashing me against the hard wall would probably quickly result in physical injury.”

After this beating, Abu Zubaydah was placed in a small box approximately three feet tall. “They placed a cloth or cover over the box to cut out all light and restrict my air supply. As it was not high enough even to sit upright, I had to crouch down. It was very difficult because of my wounds. The stress on my legs held in this position meant my wounds both in the leg and stomach became very painful. I think this occurred about three months after my last operation. It was always cold in the room, but when the cover was placed over the box it made it hot and sweaty inside. The wound on my leg began to open and started to bleed. I don’t know how long I remained in the small box; I think I may have slept or maybe fainted.

“I was then dragged from the small box, unable to walk properly, and put on what looked like a hospital bed, and strapped down very tightly with belts. A black cloth was then placed over my face and the interrogators used a mineral water bottle to pour water on the cloth so that I could not breathe. After a few minutes the cloth was removed and the bed was rotated into an upright position. The pressure of the straps on my wounds was very painful. I vomited.

“The bed was then again lowered to horizontal position and the same torture carried out again with the black cloth over my face and water poured on from a bottle. On this occasion my head was in a more backward, downwards position and the water was poured on for a longer time. I struggled against the straps, trying to breathe, but it was hopeless.”

After being placed again in the tall box, Abu Zubaydah “was then taken out and again a towel was wrapped around my neck and I was smashed into the wall with the plywood covering and repeatedly slapped in the face by the same two interrogators as before.

“I was then made to sit on the floor with a black hood over my head until the next session of torture began. The room was always kept very cold.

This went on for approximately one week.”

•

Walid bin Attash, a Saudi involved with planning the attacks on American embassies in Africa in 1998 and on the Navy destroyer Cole in 2000, was captured in Pakistan on April 29, 2003:

“On arrival at the place of detention in Afghanistan I was stripped naked. I remained naked for the next two weeks.... I was kept in a standing position, feet flat on the floor, but with my arms above my head and fixed with handcuffs and a chain to a metal bar running across the width of the cell. The cell was dark with no light, artificial or natural.”

This forced standing, with arms shackled above the head, seems to have become standard procedure. It proved especially painful for Mr. bin Attash, who had lost a leg fighting in Afghanistan:

“After some time being held in this position my stump began to hurt so I removed my artificial leg to relieve the pain. Of course my good leg then began to ache and soon started to give way so that I was left hanging with all my weight on my wrists.”

Cold water was used on Mr. bin Attash in combination with beatings and the use of a plastic collar, which seems to have been a refinement of the towel that had been looped around Abu Zubaydah’s neck:

“On a daily basis during the first two weeks a collar was looped around my neck and then used to slam me against the walls of the interrogation room. It was also placed around my neck when being taken out of my cell for interrogation and was used to lead me along the corridor. It was also used to slam me against the walls of the corridor during such movements.

“Also on a daily basis during the first two weeks I was made to lie on a plastic sheet placed on the floor which would then be lifted at the edges. Cold water was then poured onto my body with buckets.... I would be kept wrapped inside the sheet with the cold water for several minutes. I would then be taken for interrogation.”

•

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the key planner of the 9/11 attacks, was captured in Pakistan on March 1, 2003.

After three days in what he believes was a prison in Afghanistan, Mr. Mohammed was put in a tracksuit, blindfold, hood and headphones, and shackled and placed aboard a plane. He quickly fell asleep — “the first proper sleep in over five days” — and remains unsure of how long the journey took. On arrival, however, he realized he had come a long way:

“I could see at one point there was snow on the ground. Everybody was wearing black, with masks and army boots, like Planet X people. I think the country was Poland. I think this because on one occasion a water bottle was brought to me without the label removed. It had [an] e-mail address ending in ‘.pl.’”

He was stripped and put in a small cell. “I was kept for one month in the cell in a standing position with my hands cuffed and shackled above my head and my feet cuffed and shackled to a point in the floor,” he told the Red Cross.

“Of course during this month I fell asleep on some occasions while still being held in this position. This resulted in all my weight being applied to the handcuffs around my wrist, resulting in open and bleeding wounds. [Scars consistent with this allegation were visible on both wrists as well as on both ankles.] Both my feet became very swollen after one month of almost continual standing.”

For interrogation, Mr. Mohammed was taken to a different room. The sessions lasted for as long as eight hours and as short as four.

“If I was perceived not to be cooperating I would be put against a wall and punched and slapped in the body, head and face. A thick flexible plastic collar would also be placed around my neck so that it could then be held at the two ends by a guard who would use it to slam me repeatedly against the wall. The beatings were combined with the use of cold water, which was poured over me using a hose-pipe.”

As with Abu Zubaydah, the harshest sessions involved the “alternative set of procedures” used in sequence and in combination, one technique intensifying the effects of the others:

“The beatings became worse and I had cold water directed at me from a hose-pipe by guards while I was still in my cell. The worst day was when I was beaten for about half an hour by one of the interrogators. My head was banged against the wall so hard that it started to bleed. Cold water was poured over my head. This was then repeated with other interrogators. Finally I was taken for a session of water boarding. The torture on that day was finally stopped by the intervention of the doctor.”

Reading the Red Cross report, one becomes somewhat inured to the “alternative set of procedures” as they are described: the cold and repeated violence grow numbing. Against this background, the descriptions of daily life of the detainees in the black sites, in which interrogation seems merely a periodic heightening of consistently imposed brutality, become more striking.

Here again is Mr. Mohammed:

“After each session of torture I was put into a cell where I was allowed to lie on the floor and could sleep for a few minutes. However, due to shackles on my ankles and wrists I was never able to sleep very well.... The toilet consisted of a bucket in the cell, which I could use on request” — he was shackled standing, his hands affixed to the ceiling — “but I was not allowed to clean myself after toilet during the first month.... I wasn’t given any clothes for the first month. Artificial light was on 24 hours a day, but I never saw sunlight.”

•

Abu Zubaydah, Walid bin Attash, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed — these men almost certainly have blood on their hands. There is strong reason to believe that they had critical parts in planning and organizing terrorist operations that caused the deaths of thousands of people. So in all likelihood did the other “high-value detainees” whose treatment while secretly confined by the United States is described in the Red Cross report.

From everything we know, many or all of these men deserve to be tried and punished — to be “brought to justice,” as President Bush vowed they would be. The fact that judges, military or civilian, throw out cases of prisoners who have been tortured — and have already done so at Guantánamo — means it is highly unlikely that they will be brought to justice anytime soon.

For the men who have committed great crimes, this seems to mark perhaps the most important and consequential sense in which “torture doesn’t work.” The use of torture deprives the society whose laws have been so egregiously violated of the possibility of rendering justice. Torture destroys justice. Torture in effect relinquishes this sacred right in exchange for speculative benefits whose value is, at the least, much disputed.

As I write, it is impossible to know definitively what benefits — in intelligence, in national security, in disrupting Al Qaeda — the president’s approval of use of an “alternative set of procedures” might have brought to the United States. Only a thorough investigation, which we are now promised, much belatedly, by the Senate Intelligence Committee, can determine that.

What we can say with certainty, in the wake of the Red Cross report, is that the United States tortured prisoners and that the Bush administration, including the president himself, explicitly and aggressively denied that fact. We can also say that the decision to torture, in a political war with militant Islam, harmed American interests by destroying the democratic and Constitutional reputation of the United States, undermining its liberal sympathizers in the Muslim world and helping materially in the recruitment of young Muslims to the extremist cause. By deciding to torture, we freely chose to embrace the caricature they had made of us. The consequences of this choice, legal, political and moral, now confront us. Time and elections are not enough to make them go away.

Mark Danner, a professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and Bard College, is the author of "Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror.” This essay is drawn from a longer article in the new issue of The New York Review of Books, available at www.nybooks.com.

The Bakken Formation, in North Dakota and Montana

2009-03-16T01:07:00.001-04:00

The USGS has determined that the Bakken Formation, in North Dakota and Montana, has 25 times more technically recoverable oil than was estimated in the USGS's 1995 assessment.

We sit down with USGS scientists Brenda Pierce and Rich Pollastro to learn more.

Subject: Oil Shortage ??

1. Before you read the story below, go to this NGS site first.

http://www.usgs. gov/newsroom/ article.asp? ID=1911

The U. S. Geological Service issued a report in April ('08) that only scientists and oil men knew was coming, but man was it big. It was a revised report (hadn't been updated since '95) on how much oil was in this area of the western 2/3 of North Dakota; western South Dakota ; and extreme eastern Montana ...... check THIS out:

The Bakken is the largest domestic oil discovery since Alaska's Prudhoe Bay , and has the potential to eliminate all American dependence on foreign oil. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates it at 503 billion barrels.. Even if just 10% of the oil is recoverable. ... at $107 a barrel, we're looking at a resource base worth more than $5.3 trillion 'When I first briefed legislators on this, you could practically see their jaws hit the floor. They had no idea.' says Terry Johnson, the Montana Legislature' s financial analyst. 'This sizable find is now the highest-producing onshore oil field found in the past 56 years.' reports, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette. It's a formation known as the Williston Basin , but is more commonly referred to as the 'Bakken.' And it stretches from Northern Montana , through North Dakota and into Canada .. For years, U. S. oil exploration has been considered a deadend. Even the 'Big Oil' companies gave up searching for major oil wells decades ago. However, a recent technological breakthrough has opened up the Bakken's massive reserves.... and we now have access of up to 500 billion barrels. And because this is light, sweet oil, those billions of barrels will cost Americans just $16 PER BARREL! That's enough crude to fully fuel the American economy for 41 years straight.

2. And if THAT didn't throw you on the floor, then this next one should - because it's from TWO YEARS AGO! U. S. Oil Discovery- Largest Reserve in the World! Stansberry Report Online - 4/20/2006

Hidden 1,000 feet beneath the surface of the Rocky Mountains lies the largest untapped oil reserve in the world is more than 2 TRILLION barrels. On August 8, 2005 President Bush mandated its extraction. They reported this stunning news: We have more oil inside our borders, than all the other proven reserves on earth. Here are the official estimates:

- 8-times as much oil as Saudi Arabia
- 18-times as much oil as Iraq
- 21-times as much oil as Kuwait
- 22-times as much oil as Iran
- 500-times as much oil as Yemen
- and it's all right here in the Western United States .

HOW can this BE? HOW can we NOT BE extracting this? Because the environmentalists and others have blocked all efforts to help America become independent of foreign oil! James Bartis, lead researcher with the study says we've got more oil in this very compact area than the entire Middle East -more than 2 TRILLION barrels untapped. That's more than all the proven oil reserves of crude oil in the world today, reports The Denver Post. Don't think 'OPEC' will drop its price - even with this find?

Think again! It's all about the competitive marketplace, - it has to.

Got your attention fire up yet? Hope so! Now, while you're
thinking about it .... and hopefully P.O'd, do this:

3. Pass this along. If you don't take a little time to do this, then you should stifle yourself the next time you want to complain about gas prices .. because by doing NOTHING, you've forfeited your right to complain.

--------

Now I just wonder what would happen in this country if every one of you sent this to everyone in your address book.

GOOGLE it or click on this link.

http://www.usgs. gov/newsroom/ article.asp? ID=1911

War crimes update(s)

2009-03-16T00:13:00.002-04:00

The world's great genocide test

Nat Hentoff
Monday, March 16, 2009

In 2005, after I had long been covering the atrocities committed by Sudan's president, Gen. Omar Hassanal-Bashir, on black Christians and animists in the south - followed by his genocide against black Muslims in Darfur - I saw an urgent message in The Washington Post by two senators, Democrat Barack Obama of Illinois and Republican Sam Brownback of Kansas. With the United Nations characteristically useless, the senators gave me some hope this holocaust could be ended.

In "Policy adrift in Darfur," the senators (Mr. Brownback has actually gone to Darfur) wrote: "If the United States does not change its approach to Darfur, an already grim situation is likely to spiral out of control. ... When the history of this tragedy is written, nobody will remember how many times officials visited the region or how much humanitarian aid was delivered. They will only remember the death toll."

As the death toll continued to mount, there was hope again on March 4 when the International Criminal Court at last issued an arrest warrant for Africa's Hitler, Gen. al-Bashir. He is charged with five crimes against humanity: murder, extermination, forcible transfer (of civilian populations), torture and rape.

This personification of evil will also be tried, if he can be apprehended, for two war crimes: intentionally directing attacks against civilians and for pillaging, his forces stealing livestock and burning villages, with black infants sometimes tossed into the flames. Strangely, the charge of genocide is not included, although there is ample evidence that Gen. al-Bashir fully intended to destroy the black tribes of Darfur - as his ruthless Janjaweed killers kept gleefully assuring their victims.

Also on March 4, before an orchestrated, huge crowd in Khartoum, Gen. al-Bashir, as he was dancing and swaying, told the ICC to "eat" its arrest warrant while the cheering crowd burned in effigy the court's undeviating chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, who clearly should have been Time magazine's "Man of the Year."

In further strutting his contempt of the ICC, Gen. al-Bashir commanded 13 foreign humanitarian organizations to get out of the country within 24 hours as his thugs ransacked their offices, taking computers and whatever cash they could find.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, at last summoning what appeared to be real clear anger at the bloodthirsty head of a sovereign state, emphasized that 4.7 million of Gen. al-Bashir's people are in need of aid. These are such basic needs as food, drinking water and medical care.

Amid clinics closing and deteriorating sanitation, such infectious diseases as cholera will spread. On March 6, The Washington Times and the Associated Press quoted World Health Organization spokeswoman Fadela Chaib on an outbreak of meningitis in Nyala, south of Darfur. Precisely in that area the Dutch branch of Doctors Without Borders was carrying out meningitis vaccinations. But this indispensable humanitarian organization was one of the 13 expelled by Gen. al-Bashir.

Said one of its ousted workers, who had been assigned to one of Darfur's largest refugee camps, "People have nothing there. The meningitis outbreak alone could lead to thousands of deaths." (The Washington Post, March 5.)

On Feb. 21, anticipating the ICC's issuance of this first arrest warrant for a sitting head of state, Gen. al-Bashir's rightly feared head of Sudan's National Security and Intelligence Service, Salah Gosh (a sometimes CIA Intelligence source about terrorists in Africa, but not in Khartoum) has warned anyone anywhere who intended to actually arrest his commander in chief:

"Anyone who attempts to put his hands to execute [International Criminal Court] plans, we will cut his hands, head and parts because it is a non-negotiable issue." And with unexpected frankness, he added (as reported by the invaluable sudantribune.com):

"We [the government] were Islamic extremists, then became moderate and civilized, believing in peace and life for everyone. However, we will revert back to how we were if necessary. There is nothing any easier than that." Mr. Gosh somehow omitted saying actually when the former National Islamic Front government had become civilized.

Presumably, Gen. al-Bashir is a wanted man anywhere he travels. The ICC's court registrar, Silvana Arbia, declares that the obligation to surrender Gen. al-Bashir falls on all 108 countries that are part of the ICC; members of the U.N. Security Council; "and any other state as may be necessary." And chief Prosecutor Moreno-Ocampo insists:

"The judges were clear. There is no immunity for heads of states before the ICC. As soon as al-Bashir travels through international air space, he can be arrested. It will be two months or two years, but he will face justice."

Will he really be in the dock at The Hague?

Next week: With Gen. al-Bashir still a free genocidaire, the only realistic way, so far, to ensure he and justice will finally meet begins with, as I shall explain, no-fly zones over Sudan. It will be up to NATO; the European Union, particularly France; and President Obama. George W. Bush was the first head of state to call this Sudan holocaust genocide. But it continued, and grew. Barack Obama's administration is "urgently" reviewing what should be done. We'll see.

Nat Hentoff is a nationally renowned authority on the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights. He is a member of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

And this on Tony Blair:

Will Bush Ever Face World Court? (update)

2009-03-10T07:54:00.002-04:00

The International Criminal Court recently issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, a move Sudanese officials denounced as politically motivated. Will it ever be the case that the ICC takes former U.S. President George W. Bush to task?

2009-03-10T04:42:00.000-04:00

10 March 2009

Toronto City Housing Corporation
80 Broadview Avenue
Toronto Ontario

Dear Sirs:

I have been asked to write to you and be explicit in my compliants about my treatment at 133 Broadway Avenue,
Apartment 2, Toronto, Ontario M4P 1V5.

At this address, I have asked for a transfer with supporting medical and social opinion supporting
this request for one and one/half years. This includes a doctor, two psychiatrists, numerous specialists,
and occupational therapists. I have numerous disabilities: poor vision, reduced hearing and no hearing aids,
fibromyalgia, arthritis, multiple chemical sensitivities, thyroid disease. I am a 60 year old senior.

This year I have been attacked the following times: once at CAMH when my walker was taken away, tortured at
St. Joseph's Hospital, given extremely painful therapy at a pain clinic, beaten twice nearly to death by my son,
assaulted by the tenants in the building, and early run over.

There are four other major grounds for an IMMEDIATE transfer:

(1) I am the victim of domestic assault, which qualifies me for first priority rehousing

AND

(2) I have been robbed and assaulted by persons in my building whilst being harassed by the local police force.
I have filed official charges against 53 division and TCHC for ongoing neglect. I was assaulted by Nadine Ederman on December 1st:
now I have been attacked by her illegal occupant two days ago. TCHC and 53 Division even refuse to give me his name.

Both these individuals have habitually robbed my apartment of hundreds of dollars, jewelry, glasses, cigarettes. They have stolen my
clothes including shoes and boots.

I have been living in the street for over one month due to the trauma caused to me.

(3) There is an ongoing harassment issue. The the police 53 Division arrests my paranoid schizophrenic son who is now almost brain
damaged and living in horrible conditions at a halfway house in Kensington. He has been destroyed by toxic psychiatric chemicals at
Sunnybrook and St. Joseph's Hospital. He has been deemed incompetant by psychiatrists who never even spoke with me and gave
him illegal forming without any judicial process.

I have been sexually assaulted and stalked at this address and been subjected to being nearly run over by Blackwater Security guards.

(4) Our belongings were stolen or destroyed by other occupants AND by staff at this location. I have nothing left save a moldy couch
now. These furnishings were provided to me by the furniture bank as at my previous location I had had over $100,00 worth of
books and furnishings taken illegally at Ryding Avenue. There the West End legal clinic had a hand in my demise.

What is especially disgusting is that Flemingdon Legal the legal provider for our area does NOTHING to help us get our day in court in
any venue.

I was nearly arrested at a housing tribunal on January 6th. There has been NO followup housing tribunal. This is CLEARLY illegal
regardless of excuses by the Landlord Tenant Board and unfortunately I do not even know where to appeal about that
except to the human rights tribuanl at 400 University.

I am beyond grief and live in total despair !! My apartment is loaded with mold and aggravates my health. I just recoverd from
pneumonia I had for two weeks and no appeals to TCHC were listened to. You cannot imagine the state of health I am in today
despite my taking as much care of myself as I am able.

The Ontario Disability Support Program evades all calls from my physician and Flemingdon Legal allows them to flaunt her requests.
She allowed my to take taxis to see to my son's and my health. I am about $1,700 out of pocket (and remember I live on ODSP
and have no relatives in Canada) in cab fares!!

I am owed about $14,000 in back US taxes that I cannot collect as the tribiunal date has not been set; further, Flemingdon
Legal refused to represent my son in his claim to over $100,000 in back US Social Security payments.

I find in unconscientable that no one takes responsibility for this ongoing social and financial failure at 133 Broadway in the treatment
of myself and my son.

Please, I BEG you to give me an immediate transfer and move to give me a day in court against the occupants in 309. I have received
death threats from the man who gives them their crack and furnished TCHC with his name, David Levin, 160 Erskine months ago.

I am so traumaitzed I no longer speak in plain english and wander the streets. Although Sunnybrook Hospital is trying to cover their
incompetance and broken promises to me, I assure you that I am still sane but need social contact which my present location does
not provide. A senior's residence in the Danforth was offered to me months ago, but no followup was done by TCHC since that time.
I am not psychotic; I have extreme post traumatic stress disorder and really need immediate help.

Also, I attempted to get a Town Hall meeting for a political protest and was threatened by Larry Frost at the Native American Centre;
also located within 53 Division. No charges were laid against him either.

No number of calls to TIPS has helped.

I have no computer and am paying to type this letter in an internet cafe !! My phone will be turned off shortly at the rate things are
going.

Things have become so complex that I repeat no one has a clue where I should turn for help. I have asked for a safe haven in a justice
house, even. I have been forced by mouse infestation and the lack of electricity to move out of the location THREE times already.

Please reply soonest. Today I got another brush off from the Police Services Board and I have cried all day long as I have on MANY
previous occassions.

How I will even move is open to question as even the moving boxes were taken and I have no help to move my belongings. Due
to the problems in the building the province ruled I should move back in August and yet they have abandoned me now.

Please, help me today. I have repeatedly made an attempt to reach the City Counsellor and he does not reply. I have asserted I
would run against him. This is not the sign of mental illness; it is the sign of being totally frustrated.

I have no competant legal representation and beg you to hear me and my son's pleas. He has lost so much not being able to attend school
and neither have I. The financial losses are just too considerable.

Why are real criminals allowed to walk free and yet I am not allowed a safe place to live? I have been told to go "home" to Minnesota by
the local police although I have been a resident of Canada for 14 years !! One million dollars was spent keeping us from getting refugee
status, and yet here we are March 2009 with a few dollars and nowhere safe to live.

Yours faithfully,

Virginia Simson

cc: Ombudsman Ontario
Ontario Disability Support Program
Dr. E. Jean Robison
Dr. Bryn Wearn
Dr. Kwame McKenzie
President, Sunnybrook Hospital
Police Services Board
53 Division, Toronto Police
Human Rights Tribunal
The Toronto Star; Jim Rankin
El Farouk Khaki
Royal College of Physicians.

The 60th Birthday Blues: How to become an (overstressed) spiritwalker

2009-03-04T04:10:00.014-05:00

When life is so overwhelming

you can not cope,

what happens then?

Well, there is the post traumatic stress disorder response and that can become compounded (see: Judith Lewis Herman's book, Trauma and Recovery). Dissociation/panic "disorder" can become the order of the day.

But what occurs when life conspires to be so

klusterfucked

that your adrenals fail

but

- you MUST keep functioning and cannot afford going insane while being totally victimized -

WHAT THEN?

This is a measure of my life's state and the political reality in which we are living.

I am locating a creative solution to the IMPOSSIBLE in the only way my psyche can find with the resources available. I cannot afford to feel helpless and hopeless.

This ministry becomes something referred to in shamanic circles as

DREAM WALKING or SPIRIT WALKING.

I walk.

I rap

in rhythm and time.

I prophesize.

I read your hand and see who you are.

I'll guess your sign.

I hand you an angel card or a biscuit for your dog.

I ask you to pray.

I dance for your souls.

and why?

It is my "gift" from The Creator.

I have three massive ongoing traumatic issues and I bring them and get damned personal on this blog today as it is my sixtieth birthday and I have every single right to bring up THE TRUTH.

I wanted to have a semi sane dinner with my son tonight; yet instead I ate alone and was threatened with arrest TWICE today for merely trying to explain myself and stick up for my son.

I am burnt out and have become a spiritual entity, while having few REAL social supports to help me out. Yet, I am political and have a message. I am talented and can dance and sing. I dream ... on.

As we say in Minnesota: How come?

I was raised in a mixed race family. My mother (and I AM her daughter) kept my brother, Ronnie at a time such "things" were not the done thing. Despite a violent childhood, my elder brother and I were very close.

My mother was killed by my father, who committed suicide the same steamy day in July. It is my surmise he did this while in a black out. As children we went to live with my grandparents who were ritual abusers. No, they did not wear funny costumes. They were "nice": pillars of the community but people feared my grandfather and no one intervened. I left home at 15, taking my brother out of the end-of-the-line white family as quickly as I possibly could. Ronnie never lived with us.

I was a flower child/hippie during the 1960's. A conundrum I assure you. An original SDSer and I helped found the American Indian Move ment, which grew out of the Minneapolis welfare rights movement.

I have been married and lost my eldest son. I've lived in high and low places. I am not going to publish my resume here, though. I just want you to understand the politics of this thang. I am firm believer in communication not CONTROL nor war.

My husband James Simson, Miles and I came to Canada as refugees in 1994 under the War on Drugs - and it took eight years for us to gain admittance, which was resolved as a Humane Compassionate Relief decision. This is the second longest immigration resolution in Canadian history; no NATO country is going to accept another nation's citizens as refugees. Trust me on that. Our final adjudicator was Alex Neve - who I unkindly refer to as Michael Never- who is the head of Canada's Amnesty International.

The "case" went through the appeals process and we lost there, too. By the time our number came up it was decided in Miles' best interest that we remain in Canada. Miles suffered extreme sexual abuse at the hands of his father and it was horrible to be removed from the United States as we had just gotten settled in and were doing really well when turfed out.

We lived in FEAR of the United States ever since. By the time the decision was made, we had been abandoned by my husband, James. This caused Miles to shutdown and resort to drug usage: he smoked tainted pot. Later, he turned to XTC for relief as he feared my death following an accident and he became a paranoid schizophrenic.

What brought us to this state of being summarily kicked out of the United States? I stood up for Leonard Peltier, the native activist to Senator Paul Wellstone. It is my profound belief that he and my ex-husband, Scott Borene, an immigration attorney colluded to have me thrown out. Not everyone wonderfulizes those two.

Two years ago I was given substandard housing by the City of Toronto following a disastrous affair whereby everything was thrown away: my son and I - who have no relatives here in Canada - had everything thrown away.

I took this substandard apartment because I followed the need to get out of the shelter system following a depressive/PTSD episode over this traumatic event. I applied for an immediate transfer two years ago as my chemical sensitivities just could NOT take the environmental impact. At that time I suffered SEVERE fibromyalgia and was overweight, despite having spent years doing yoga and being extremely flexible earlier. Yet, I was saved by a friend who helped me find orthomolecular medicene.

I continued the blogging I had begun: it was mostly on spiritual and health matters and I ran a group that numbered roughly 50 people called Earthlings Anonymous that aimed to find solutions to problems for seven generations in the future.

To my astonishment, an "Anonymous" commentator began to appear with regular "private" comments and I followed the suggestions made to me to the letter.

I was given information on Blackwater, Infragard, war crimes, and all manner of US political information. I followed instructions to the letter. I was a good investigator and found out much and my blog was a smash success many days.

It was suggested to me in the secret comments that I was Canada's newest member of the International Criminal Court and that I should expect deep Canadian support for what I was doing; I was picked because I was "special." I assumed I would go The Hague and have a nice plump salary!! Yeah, right. War crimes HAVE been committed and I do know much about them. But if you saw my life today you'd wonder where I EVER got that idea !!

(And let this be my first statement that ALWAYS get real evidence before you ever believe anything, as the evidence clearly does not support that anonymous assertion. A similar claim was made to me via International Clearinghouse online by this same poster that my "case" regarding my illegal expulsion from the United States was being investigated by the Department of Justice.)

During this entire time, my house was being regularly invaded by stalkers and a mysterious person(s) who took things at night. I thought that it was some sort of alphabet souper (ya know, CIA, CSIS or something) - but it was cigarettes, bras, and then LARGE sums of money that would disappear. Sometimes I would have to go over to my son's house to get supplies and walk many miles. I socially as I knew I was being followed and surveilled, particularly by Blackwater.

Last year, things got SO fraught that I tried to commit suicide on my birthday because the walker I had been promised was taken away and not one single birthday card arrived. This resulted in my THIRD near death experience - a phenomena that adds import to what is to follow.

Fortunately, my son and an online friend caught it and my life was saved.

Meanwhile the psychiatric reports and specialist opinions continued to pour in that I NEEDED to move out of this unhealthy environment. I was in physical pain and I dissociated.

During this entire time, my house was being regularly invaded by stalkers and a mysterious person(s) who took things at night. I thought that it was some sort of alphabet souper (ya know, CIA, CSIS or something) - but it was cigarettes, bras, and then LARGE sums of money that would disappear. Sometimes I would have to go over to my son's house to get supplies and walk many miles. I would go to the police and complian long and hard.

In my son's police district I spoke to them about prosecuting George W. Bush and spoke to the District Attorney about it not knowing that this approach had been tried before.

I walked the streets handing out cards about my blog to get support.

I was promised help getting to the Andover War Crimes Conference by my local MP's office. I sold hundreds of copies of the Bugliosi book: yet since I could not raise $20,000 to set up an office and meet our needs I have never received much more than a few paltry donations and no commission on the sale of the book. I invited them to come to a Town Hall I had to put on myself after other arrangements fell through at my own expense. Peculiar, I have NEVER met the local MP yet.

However, this town hall never materialized. I had spent my own money trying urgently to get a town hall preparation meeting in order through the local Native Friendship Centre. However, at the last minute on TWO occasions they were abruptly cancelled. This was to provide funds for me and another law student to travel to Massachusetts. I was threatened by the head of the Centre, a Mr. Larry Frost. There is a key to the blog which could net the native community money AND the sales of the book at the event would have added to their coffers.

In the end one of my fellowship friends helped me get the money by saying I had moved into her apartment and I went to Andover alone.

When I got there I was shocked that Jordan J. Paust did not attend. I was sure he knew about my blog. I believed "testing" was NOT W. Richard West and he was not going to attend. I still do not know who that individual is; but I assure you that the assertion that my "back is covered" is certainly not true. The Robert Jackson Conference was extremely important and I am proud that I attended. But as a nonregistered participant I get no updates and none of the materials.

Instead when I came back, the crap began hitting the fan. My son was in a hospital and the police would not tell me where he was. Since then, he has been in three hospitals and none of them the correct one !! He has been formed, arrested and I have been humiliated publically by these hospitals and I could not get anyone to help me sue them for their misconduct.

I have been in total distress. I have been attacked physically five times in the past six months.

The man who claimed to be a Special Forces officer and an ally turned out to be the local crack dealer and he has threatened me on several occasions. No one arrests HIM, but they do my son.

Yes, I have even called Centre for the Victims of Torture for help. I have asked for therapeutic support. Even from senior's groups. None of it is forthcoming. It's been six months of attrition of anything approaching normalcy or legality !!

The disability people have treated me horribly and I went without electricity for a long time. My neighbors have thrown my belongings away !! My friends are horrified at the conditions in my apartment and don't come back.

Due to the theft of all my property two years ago and the fact that the US did not mail back my passport after I applied, the blog cannot accept donations even if they are made.

I have not gotten my $14,000 plus in back US taxes nor the nearly $2,000 I paid out in cab fares back so I am stuck in the apartment with the mouse shit even now !!

I have called the local City Councillor numerous times about my problems; he does nothing and I have filed an official complaint against the local police department.

I have found out James has died so there is no way to appeal to him for assistance. Further, my law suit against Scott has failed because I cannot prove he owes me money, but he does.

No lawuist has gone up against Sunnybrook nor St. Joseph's hospital, who are guilty under Canada's Mental Health Act of violating both Miles and my rights.

I now suffer extreme traumatic arthritis from the physical attacks I took from Miles and the crack addict.

I have become extremely interested in the symptomology that the war crimes have produced here in our cities, though.

The synthesis of urban decay, military keynesianISM, the fiscal crisis and people's responses is key. We must be prepared for what is ahead and Dmitri Orlov has said it best. People must not self medicate with drugs and alcohol to avoid facing what is going to happen very soon in our suburbs and urban areas.

But there are solutions and I have been proposing them to everyone that I can. These include using Shipping crate container buildings/solar energy to rebuild our city housing; this will eliminate the homelessness. And our spaces must be better utilized. To this end I say I will run against our local City Councillor during my "raps": it only costs $200 to run. And I could pay it all in pennies. But Dreamwalkers make horrible politicians although we have our fingers right on the pulse. I feel I have become an urban minister, but the pay is zilch and the energy expended enormous, but I had to do something while I cannot get get Miles released !!

Would I really run for office? I'd have to get Canadian Citizenship and to my surprise I don't have it and only found out when applying for a Canadian passport.

HOPES AND DREAMS

Instead of being a member of the International Criminal Court, I might become a participant in Voices from the Street, if I am fortunate. I certainly understand the issues of mental health, addiction and homelessness in a very deep mannner. I do wish I could have capitalized on some celebrity coming up to Toronto, particularly Vincent Bugliosi, but this never materialized.

So my three traumas: getting Ontario Disability to live up to their mandate and give me my cab funds; getting Toronto Housing to get me transferred and give me a hearing which is now two months overdue; and then to get the police department and Toronto City Housing to due its duty against CRIMINALS. Miles is owed $100,000 in back social security and the doctors don't let him out to collect it nor even get his disability allowance money !! So we live in dire straights which is totally INSANE.

Find housing with social supports and a chance to grow things, have a dog and go back to school if Voices does not work out.

I want my eldest son to realize he is NOT recovering and that the restraining order he put out on me after not seeing me or his brother for fourteen years is mean and cruel. I want to meet my grandchildren. I worked very hard to give him the opportunities and blessings that make his life extremely comfortable financially. I have post traumatic stress and am not a "mental case" as he insists.

Is it too much to ask??? I think I have at least another 30 years to accomplish some of this.

* S * P * I * R * I * T *

W * A * L * K * I * N * G

I am your sister.

Please treat me as such.

You would not want your sister treated this way.

Don't take the spirit out if spirituality.

I ride the Zuvuya for you.

Remember: what happened to me could happen to anyone who faces an orphaned existence.

How many tears can this old woman cry?

Yet only kindness to others can help me out.

Widowed, orphaned and homeless now.

Knowing we are all ONE fellowship, really.

My name is Virginia:

remember my name.

How can they arrest my vulnerable son and yet let the real criminals go free?

Megweetch for reading

This was the saddest birthday I have ever had, really.

I want my son restored to sane living and a chance to have real therapy not poison thrown down his throat .

I want to have sane, deep social contacts outside that horrible building.

Your friend,

Many Rivers
Dharam Kaur

Who dances the message into your palm:

Mitayake Oyasin

Mohawk Nation update

2009-03-04T04:09:00.001-05:00

WE’RE BAAAACK!! “JUDICIAL CHICANERY” OF FEDERAL COURT OF CANADA SIDE-SWIPED – Call for investigation!

MNN. March 1, 200 9. On June 14, 2008, Kahentinetha and Katenies, two Mohawk women, were viciously attacked at the Cornwall Ontario border by a special squad of about twelve barking Canadian Border Services Agents CBSA dressed for combat. One woman was put into a torture stress situation meant to kill her. She suffered a trauma induced heart attack and is still recovering. The other was severely beaten and held incommunicado without access to medical attention or outside help. She is still recovering from her injuries.

Kahentinetha and Katenies live in the Mohawk communities of Akwesasne and Kahnawake. They think that everyone should be able to pass the illegal colonial border without being assaulted or killed.

No employee or official has shown any concern for the near fatal assault committed by the CBSA. They filed formal complaints for a full investigation, appropriate charges to be made against the offenders and reasonable compensation for their arrest, assault and illegal jailing. They sent requests to the Hon. Robert Nicholson, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, the Ontario Provincial Police, the RCMP, the Mohawk Akwesasne Police and the CBSA. They all refused to investigate.

The two women have no money and no lawyer. They had no choice but to represent themselves. They filed a Federal Court of Canada lawsuit to force the police and government agents to investigate this attempted murder. For $2 they filed a Statement of Claim on the ”Assault, arrest and illegal detention” by Canada Border Services Agents [Kahentinetha & Katenies v. Queen, Section 48, Federal Court Act, T-1309-08]. At first the court registry employees seemed helpful. As time went on they issued misinformation and lost documents to sabotage the lawsuit.

The crown’s first response was to file an unprecedented countersuit for Kahentinetha and Katenies to pay for Canada‘s costs. To start they wanted over $20,000 on deposit before the case could be tried, plus all subsequent costs thereafter. They justified this by claiming that Kahentinetha and Katenies are “not residents of Canada”. They based this deceptive false argument on an unsubstantiated article from a newspaper published on the internet that speculated that Katenies lived in the U.S. Kahentinetha and Katenies submitted evidence that they live in Akwesasne and Kahnawake which are located in the portion of the colony of Canada known as “Quebec”. They are considered residents of Canada by the Canadian government. The court refused to accept the evidence.

Kahentinetha and Katenies were pleased with FCC’s order that respects Indigenous jurisdiction over Turtle Island. According to Canada’s own order and laws, the demand for money is a human rights violation and Canada must remove its border control.

Prothonotary Mireille Tabib of FCC issued the order that the two women must put $6,500 before the case would proceed. Kahentinetha and Katenies appealed. They argued that Canada cannot claim that Kahnawake and Akwesasne are not part of Canada so as to classify them as “non-residents” to make them pay court costs, while they treat these communities as parts of Canada, including having a border control in the center. This was a very strong argument. So they stooped to skullduggery. They “lost” the appeal documents.

When the crown did not reply, Kahentinetha phoned the FCC registry. She was told the documents were lost. Then they suddenly found them. Kahentinetha and Katenies were instructed to re-file the appeal and to ask “for an extension of time”.

FCC Judge Francois Lemieux then issued an order denying them the extension of time. He made no ruling on the unconstitutional posting of money by victims of a crime carried out by agents of the state. His deflection made it impossible for the women to appeal. Such a cynical and willful obstruction of justice was unexpected.

Kahentinetha and Katenies, having no money, no jobs and no attachable assets, had to abandon the case. Then on February 26, 2009, Kahentinetha filed a brand new suit on the “Reckless disregard for the safety and security of Indigenous Women at the Canadian Border, Akwesasne” [FCC File No. T-288-09, Kahentinetha v. Queen]. Not forgotten is that men are also abused at the border.

Canada continues judicial chicanery with blindness to the rule of law. As a signatory to international human rights instruments, Canada’s Constitution Act, 1982, states everyone is equal before the law. People, no matter what part of the world they come from, cannot be beaten up by state agents with impunity.

Hardball bullying that Kahentinetha and Katenies got from the FCC shows that it is impossible for Indigenous to get our issues discussed rationally and resolved according to generally accept Canadian and international legal principles. Canadian and international opinion does not support this high handed and unethical behavior.

Kahentinetha is not a Canadian citizen and Kahnawake and Akwesasne are not part of Canada as recognized by Prothonotary Mireille Tabib’s order of 23 October, 2008 [FCC No. T-1309] and by Judge Francois Lemieux’s order of 29 January 2009 [ FCC No. T-1309-08].

The assault can be proven by both civilian and government of Canada witnesses, by medical and hospital records and by videotape evidence which is in the hands of the CBSA.

Kahentinetha and Katenies’ main purposes for their legal actions are to demand a full and fair investigation of: 1) the assault; 2) the failure to investigate; 3) the loss of documents and unethical treatment by the FCC; and 4) the action to be tried without delay in the FCC at 30 McGill Street, Montreal, Quebec.

Canada continues to use its courts as a political weapon to allow its agents to abuse us with impunity. This case cannot be swept under the carpet of judicial chicanery.

Ieriwaonni & MNN Staff Mohawk Nation News www.mohawknationnews.com katenies20@yahoo.com kahentinetha2@yahoo.com Note: Your financial help is needed and appreciated. Please send your donations by check or money order to “MNN Mohawk Nation News”, Box 991, Kahnawake [Quebec, Canada] J0L 1B0. Nia:wen thank you very much. Go to MNN “BORDER” category for more stories; New MNN Books Available now! Purchase t-shirts, mugs and more at our CafePressStore http://www.cafepress.com/mohawknews; Subscribe to MNN for breaking news updates http://.mohawknationnews.com/news/subscription.php; Sign Women Title Holders petition! http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/Iroquois
Cases FCC T-1309-08 and FCC T-288-09, Kahentinetha v. Queen.
POLITICAL, JUDICIAL & BUREAUCRATIC “DOUCE BAGS”: Hon. Robert “Contemptible-flunkey-who-protects state-criminals-and-other-agents-of-repression” Nicholson, Minister of Justice & Attorney General of Canada, Tel: 613-941-6900, Nicholson.r@parl.gc.ca, Hon. John “”Judicial-hit-man” Sims, Deputy Attorney-General of Canada, Dept. of Justice, 284 Wellington St. TSA-6032, Ottawa Ontario K1A0H8 Tel: 613-946-2774, 613-992-3452, 613-942-4238, L. Bisson, Manager, Ministerial Correspondence Unit mcu@justice.gc.ca; Charles Payette 613-952-3653, Anil Kamal 613-943-2302 Fax: 613-952-6006; Federal Court of Canada, 30 McGill St., Montreal Quebec H2Y 3Z7 Tel: 1-800-927-5499, 514-283-4820, Prothonotary Mireille “Twisted-judicial-storm-trooping-gate-keeper-with-a-history-of-unconscionable-chicanery-against-Ongwehone” Tabib, Judge Francois “Rubber-stamping-petti-fogging-cheater” Lemieux; Sgt. J.L. Pettit, RCMP Headquarters, 1200 Vanier Parkway, Ottawa K1A 0R2 Tel: 613-993-7267 Fax: 613-993-0260; Louise Steele, Ontario Provincial Police, 777 Memorial Avenue, Orillia Ontario L3V 7V3 Tel: 705-329- 6051;
COLONIAL DOUCHE BAG PUPPETS: Phil Fontaine of the AFN is a partner in CBSA’s Sustainable Development Strategy 2007-9; Chris Kealey, Canada Customs Excise, Immigration Taxation Board, CBSA Media Relations 613-991-5197; President CBSA 613-952-3200, 613-957-0612, CBSA-ASFC@Canada.gc.ca; National Aboriginal Initiative CHRC 204-983-2189 1-866-772-4880 info.com@chrc-ccdp.ca; Canada Customs Port of Entry at Cornwall Island Ontario; Quebec Human Rights presidence@cdpdj.gc.ca; Akwesasne Mohawk Police 613-575-2250 ex 2400; Mohawk Security at the border 613-932-5183, 613-575-2340; Lance Markel, District Director CBSA 613-930-3234, 613-991-1214; Brent Lefebvre, Investigator CBSA; Susan St. Clair, Canadian Human Rights Commission, 344 Slater, Ottawa 613-995-1151, 1-888-214-1090, 613-943-5188; CBSA National Spokesperson 613-957-6500; Quebec Media Relations CBSA 514-350-6130; Chief Mohawk Council Akwesasne 613-575-2250 nbenedict@akwesasne.ca; Minister Stockwell Day, Ottawa 613-995-4432; Melissa Leclair Communications Pub. Safety 613-991-2863.

Aspertame (think: Donald Rumsfield profiteer) update

2009-02-24T07:19:00.001-05:00

New Mexico Senate
Santa Fe, New Mexico
The Honorable Frank Torti, M.D.

February 12, 2009

Acting Commissioner,
United States Food and Drug Administration
5400 Fisher's Lane
Rockville, Maryland

Dear Dr. Torti:

I am the New Mexico sponsor of the enclosed Senate Memorial 9, 2009, asking the Food and Drug Administration to rescind its approval for the artificial sweetener, aspartame.

You may know that the FDA, to its credit, turned down G.D. Searle's application for aspartame's approval from 1966 to 1981, at which point, approval was forced through the FDA at the insistence of Searle's CEO, Donald Rumsfeld.

Numerous physicians' petitions as well as many private petitions have been filed with FDA since 1981 asking for the rescinding of aspartame's approval. These have all been routinely ignored and responded to with industry assurance about how many industry financed "tests" aspartame has been through, all of which showed "aspartame to be safe."

FDA used to keep records on consumer complaints on aspartame, accruing a minimum of 92 alleged symptoms from ingesting aspartame, ranging from headaches, blurred vision, skin rashes, epilepsy and multiple sclerosis to that ultimate symptom, DEATH.

Dr. Torti, this chemical has produced a massive mountain of medical and neurodengenerative evidence, which I believe would lead you to order it removed from the market. While it is too late to do this now as a "precaution"; it is even more imperative to do this as a means of preventing further medical harm to future victims.

This Memorial is advancing in the New Mexico Senate, after being cosponsored by ten of my colleagues. A similar version of the Memorial has also been introduced by Hawaii Senator Chun Oakland, and is cosponsored by ten members of the Hawaii Senate. That resolution will create an evidentiary repository for Hawaii victims, especially those with diabetes and epileptic seizures, now statistically epidemic in Hawaii, with links to aspartame.In January 2009, Hawaii Senator Kalani English introduced SB576 in that state. It would ban aspartame entirely in Hawaii. This bill is cosponsored by an astonishing 14 members of the 25 member Hawaii Senate. At the same time, Representative Mele Carroll has introduced HB669, also banning aspartame's sale and use in Hawaii.

I realize a permanent FDA Commissioner has not yet been selected by the Obama Administration, but when one is appointed, I will send a similar letter to him/her to again request this action in order to protect the American public from further harm from a chemical that the FDA has known for 43 years is metabolized as methanol, formaldehyde, aspartic acid, phenylalanine, and the proven carcinogen, diketopiperazine.This regulatory failure of epic proportions entirely resulted from the actions of Donald Rumsfeld when he was with the original patent holder for aspartame. There is sufficient evidence to warrant such a rescinding, a situation not unlike that in 1969 when President Richard Nixon similarly ordered the FDA to take away the approval for another group of carcinogens, cyclamates, which occurred very quickly.

Our concern must be the overarching concerns of preventing further neurodengenerative and carcinogenic damage to hundreds of millions of Americans, who have no other government entity to trust and depend on than the United State Food and drug Administration!

I believe that President Obama, Congressman Bart Stupak, and Congresswoman Rosa Delauro all want to see the rebuilding of an FDA that merits the restored trust of the American people. I certainly want to see this come about, and I hope you do as well.Rescinding aspartame's FDA approval would be a major credible first step in the right direction.

Sincerely yours,
Gerald Ortiz y Pino
New Mexico State Senator
District 12Albuquerque

KaKaKarl update

2009-02-24T06:01:00.002-05:00

Rove Skips House Judiciary Deposition

Submitted by Chip to afterdowningstreet on Tue, 2009-02-24 02:31.

John Bresnahan reports:

Former Bush adviser Karl Rove was a no-show today at his scheduled deposition deadline for the House Judiciary Committee's ongoing probe into the U.S. attorney firings -- setting up a major decision for President Obama on how to respond to congressional subpoenas.

Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) subpeonaed Rove to find out what he knows about the Dec. 2006 firings which eventually toppled former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

When Rove was subpoenaed in 2007, President Bush asserted "absolute immunity" for his top aides, refusing to allow them even to appear before a congressional panel. House Democrats eventually sued, and won an initial legal victory. The Bush White House, through the Justice Dept., appealed the ruling, and when Bush left office in January 2009, the case was still undecided.

White House Counsel Greg Craig has urged the two sides to cut a deal, but Rove and his attorney, Robert Luskin, have kicked it back to the White House, saying it is up to them to assert executive privilege or not.

So the next big development will occur on March 4, when the Obama administration is scheduled to file a motion in federal appeals court laying out its position on the issue.

Text of H.R. 645: National Emergency Centers Establishment Act

2009-02-24T04:55:00.002-05:00

GovTrack's bill text viewer has been recently updated. While we work out the kinks in the new viewer, archival legislative text may not be available. Your comments and suggestions for the new viewer are welcome.
This version: Introduced in House. This is the original text of the bill as it was written by its sponsor and submitted to the House for consideration. This is the latest version of the bill available on this website.

HR 645 IH

111th CONGRESS

1st Session

H. R. 645

To direct the Secretary of Homeland Security to establish national emergency centers on military installations.

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

January 22, 2009

Mr. HASTINGS of Florida introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, and in addition to the Committee on Armed Services, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned

A BILL

To direct the Secretary of Homeland Security to establish national emergency centers on military installations.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the ‘National Emergency Centers Establishment Act’.

SEC. 2. ESTABLISHMENT OF NATIONAL EMERGENCY CENTERS.

(a) In General- In accordance with the requirements of this Act, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall establish not fewer than 6 national emergency centers on military installations.

(b) Purpose of National Emergency Centers- The purpose of a national emergency center shall be to use existing infrastructure--

(1) to provide temporary housing, medical, and humanitarian assistance to individuals and families dislocated due to an emergency or major disaster;

(2) to provide centralized locations for the purposes of training and ensuring the coordination of Federal, State, and local first responders;

(3) to provide centralized locations to improve the coordination of preparedness, response, and recovery efforts of government, private, and not-for-profit entities and faith-based organizations; and

(4) to meet other appropriate needs, as determined by the Secretary of Homeland Security.

SEC. 3. DESIGNATION OF MILITARY INSTALLATIONS AS NATIONAL EMERGENCY CENTERS.

(a) In General- Not later than 60 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Secretary of Defense, shall designate not fewer than 6 military installations as sites for the establishment of national emergency centers.

(b) Minimum Requirements- A site designated as a national emergency center shall be--

(1) capable of meeting for an extended period of time the housing, health, transportation, education, public works, humanitarian and other transition needs of a large number of individuals affected by an emergency or major disaster;

(2) environmentally safe and shall not pose a health risk to individuals who may use the center;

(3) capable of being scaled up or down to accommodate major disaster preparedness and response drills, operations, and procedures;

(4) capable of housing existing permanent structures necessary to meet training and first responders coordination requirements during nondisaster periods;

(5) capable of hosting the infrastructure necessary to rapidly adjust to temporary housing, medical, and humanitarian assistance needs;

(6) required to consist of a complete operations command center, including 2 state-of-the art command and control centers that will comprise a 24/7 operations watch center as follows:

(A) one of the command and control centers shall be in full ready mode; and

(B) the other shall be used daily for training; and

(7) easily accessible at all times and be able to facilitate handicapped and medical facilities, including during an emergency or major disaster.

(c) Location of National Emergency Centers- There shall be established not fewer than one national emergency center in each of the following areas:

(1) The area consisting of Federal Emergency Management Agency Regions I, II, and III.

(2) The area consisting of Federal Emergency Management Agency Region IV.

(3) The area consisting of Federal Emergency Management Agency Regions V and VII.

(4) The area consisting of Federal Emergency Management Agency Region VI.

(5) The area consisting of Federal Emergency Management Agency Regions VIII and X.

(6) The area consisting of Federal Emergency Management Agency Region IX.

(d) Preference for Designation of Closed Military Installations- Wherever possible, the Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Secretary of Defense, shall designate a closed military installation as a site for a national emergency center. If the Secretaries of Homeland Security and Defense jointly determine that there is not a sufficient number of closed military installations that meet the requirements of subsections (b) and (c), the Secretaries shall jointly designate portions of existing military installations other than closed military installations as national emergency centers.

(e) Transfer of Control of Closed Military Installations- If a closed military installation is designated as a national emergency center, not later than 180 days after the date of designation, the Secretary of Defense shall transfer to the Secretary of Homeland Security administrative jurisdiction over such closed military installation.

(f) Cooperative Agreement for Joint Use of Existing Military Installations- If an existing military installation other than a closed military installation is designated as a national emergency center, not later than 180 days after the date of designation, the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Secretary of Defense shall enter into a cooperative agreement to provide for the establishment of the national emergency center.

(g) Reports-

(1) PRELIMINARY REPORT- Not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Homeland Security, acting jointly with the Secretary of Defense, shall submit to Congress a report that contains for each designated site--

(A) an outline of the reasons why the site was selected;

(B) an outline of the need to construct, repair, or update any existing infrastructure at the site;

(C) an outline of the need to conduct any necessary environmental clean-up at the site;

(D) an outline of preliminary plans for the transfer of control of the site from the Secretary of Defense to the Secretary of Homeland Security, if necessary under subsection (e); and

(E) an outline of preliminary plans for entering into a cooperative agreement for the establishment of a national emergency center at the site, if necessary under subsection (f).

(2) UPDATE REPORT- Not later than 120 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Homeland Security, acting jointly with the Secretary of Defense, shall submit to Congress a report that contains for each designated site--

(A) an update on the information contained in the report as required by paragraph (1);

(B) an outline of the progress made toward the transfer of control of the site, if necessary under subsection (e);

(C) an outline of the progress made toward entering a cooperative agreement for the establishment of a national emergency center at the site, if necessary under subsection (f); and

(D) recommendations regarding any authorizations and appropriations that may be necessary to provide for the establishment of a national emergency center at the site.

(3) FINAL REPORT- Not later than 1 year after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Homeland Security, acting jointly with the Secretary of Defense, shall submit to Congress a report that contains for each designated site--

(A) finalized information detailing the transfer of control of the site, if necessary under subsection (e);

(B) the finalized cooperative agreement for the establishment of a national emergency center at the site, if necessary under subsection (f); and

(C) any additional information pertinent to the establishment of a national emergency center at the site.

(4) ADDITIONAL REPORTS- The Secretary of Homeland Security, acting jointly with the Secretary of Defense, may submit to Congress additional reports as necessary to provide updates on steps being taken to meet the requirements of this Act.

SEC. 4. LIMITATIONS ON STATUTORY CONSTRUCTION.

This Act does not affect--

(1) the authority of the Federal Government to provide emergency or major disaster assistance or to implement any disaster mitigation and response program, including any program authorized by the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act (42 U.S.C. 5121 et seq.); or

(2) the authority of a State or local government to respond to an emergency.

SEC. 5. AUTHORIZATION OF APPROPRIATIONS.

There is authorized to be appropriated $180,000,000 for each of fiscal years 2009 and 2010 to carry out this Act. Such funds shall remain available until expended.

SEC. 6. DEFINITIONS.

In this Act, the following definitions apply:

(1) CLOSED MILITARY INSTALLATION- The term ‘closed military installation’ means a military installation, or portion thereof, approved for closure or realignment under the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Act of 1990 (part A of title XXIX of Public Law 101-510; 10 U.S.C. 2687 note) that meet all, or 2 out of the 3 following requirements:

(A) Is located in close proximity to a transportation corridor.

(B) Is located in a State with a high level or threat of disaster related activities.

(C) Is located near a major metropolitan center.

(2) EMERGENCY- The term ‘emergency’ has the meaning given such term in section 102 of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act (42 U.S.C. 5122).

(3) MAJOR DISASTER- The term ‘major disaster’ has the meaning given such term in section 102 of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act (42 U.S.C. 5122).

(4) MILITARY INSTALLATION- The term ‘military installation’ has the meaning given such term in section 2910 of the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Act of 1990 (part A of title XXIX of Public Law 101-510; 10 U.S.C. 2687 note).

Canada releases UFO X-Files to the World

2009-02-24T04:48:00.002-05:00

Now this is "interesting".

This may be part of a wider DISinformation racket. Today an article appeared in the cheap tabloid 24 hours that commuters regularly take in daily here in Toronto that said that UFO sitings are WAY up in Canada.

This takes one's mind off the huge problem of WAR CRIMES and militarization/securitization of all of Canada that is going on.

On the other hand, this may be very progressive news that needs to be examined.

I attended one seminar on this matter, in which Paul Hellyer and Dr. Greer met last year. I left confused and unsure as to the authenticity of what was advanced. It IS rumored that UFO's have been spotted on a leyline in Toronto on a consistent basis.

This blurb was found on Jean Hudon's Earth Rainbow network email. So I post it for your consideration anyway.

Veege

http://www.examiner.com/x-2383-Honolulu-Exopolitics-Examiner~y2009m2d16-Canada-releases-UFO-XFiles-to-the-World

The Canadian Government has authorized open public access to thousands of federal government documents concerning UFOs. A total of 9500 digitized documents spanning the years 1947 to the early 1980s have been made available through the Library and Archives Canada website. Titled "Canada's UFOs: The Search for the Unknown" the files include correspondence, reports, memos and procedures, some of which specifically deal with UFOs. The files come from Canada’s National Defense Department, the Department of Transport, the National Research Council, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Canada's release of its UFO X-Files follows closely upon the release at the end of January of Denmark's UFO files. Britain continues to release thousands of UFO files through a program of gradual releases it began in May 2007 through its national archives with the most recent being on October 2008. The French Space Agency had earlier announced on March 22, 2007, that it was making public its secret UFO files through a government website. The important difference between the released Canadian UFO files with other country releases is the inclusion of departmental analyses rather than simply reports of UFO sightings. According to Victor Viggiani from Exopolitics Toronto , who has been monitoring the Canadian Government UFO website since its inception, "The Canadian files do not simply list UFO sightings; they describe actions, meetings and inter-departmental memoranda generated by Canadian officials that attempt to make sense of the considerable onslaught of UFO sightings as well as referencing American problems with keeping abreast of UFO sightings."

2009-02-20T05:02:00.002-05:00

And one on the Obama Canada visit

2009-02-20T04:56:00.002-05:00

Obama Visits Canada, Trade And Oil On Agenda

President Barrack Obama arrived here in Ottawa, Canada, on Thursday morning for the first foreign trip of his administration, a visit that was expected to focus on the fragile world economy, the sagging auto industry, international trade, Afghanistan and energy - in particular the question of how to turn Alberta’s oil sands into a clean source of power.

Obama was greeted by the governor general of Canada, Michaelle Jean, as well as the Canadian ambassador to the United States, Michael Wilson, and a retinue of red-jacketed Canadian Mounties after Air Force One touched down in a light snow at Ottawa International Airport shortly before 10:30 a.m. The president is here for a string of official meetings and plans to hold a short news conference with Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the afternoon.

The United States is a major importer of Canadian oil, and Harper has been trying to win an agreement to exempt Canada’s vast tracts of oil sands, which contain up to 173 billion barrels of recoverable oil bound into sand and clay, from regulation. Obama is under intense pressure from environmentalists to resist that effort. Thursday’s visit is not expected to produce any detailed pact, but a White House official said the two countries would commit to working more closely together on research and information-sharing on energy and technology.

In an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation prior to his trip, Obama stopped short of using the word dirty, as environmentalists do, to describe the process of extracting oil from the sands. But he said extraction work there “creates a big carbon footprint.”

Obama may also face tensions with Harper over the issue of trade; Canada is up in arms over a “Buy America” provision inserted by Congress into the $787 billion economic recovery package Obama just signed into law, and Canadians have not forgotten Obama’s campaign pledge to reopen negotiations on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) - a pledge he has since backed away from.

Instead, White House officials say Obama will stress drafting new environmental and labor protection side-agreements to the pact, and will emphasize the $1.5 billion-a-day trading relationship between the United States and Canada, the largest trading relationship in the world.

Obama is hugely popular in Canada - one poll during the election found he is more popular here than in the United States - and the newspapers on Thursday were filled with stories about his visit.

Several thousand people stood outside the Parliament building Thursday morning, awaiting the arrival of Obama’s motorcade; when it pulled up, the crowd cheered wildly, and Obama and Harper stepped outside briefly to wave from behind a glass enclosure.

“They followed the campaign daily like we did,” said Jim Blanchard, a former ambassador to Canada under President Bill Clinton. “They were riveted to their televisions for a year and a half and very enamored with Obama, and they were very unhappy with George W. Bush,and so the fact that he is making his first foreign trip to Ottawa, and this early in his administration, is huge.”

By taking his first trip to Canada, Obama is following a sometime tradition for United States presidents. Ronald Reagan was one of those who made Canada his first official foreign visit.

Canadians have come to expect the first-visit honor ever since, though former President George W. Bush, a former governor of Texas, took his first trip to Mexico instead. (To avoid an international brouhaha, the Bush White House insisted the Mexico trip, to the ranch of former President Vicente Fox, was an unofficial visit, and that the first official presidential foreign trip was to Canada.)

The Obama White House is eager to avoid any similar slight, on matters stylistic or substantive. Denis McDonough, a deputy national security adviser to Obama, said before leaving Washington that the president was “very eager to make the trip.” Paul Cellucci, a former ambassador to Canada under Bush, said Obama would be wise to strike a friendly tone.

“As he deals with strong allies like Canada, I think he is going to have to listen to them,” said Cellucci. “You don’t want to go down the road of a trade war, if we’re getting all this energy from Canada and it’s a reliable source of energy. It’s not Venezuela, it’s not the Middle East. Why would we want to jeopardize that?”

Intellpuke: You can read this article by New York Times journalist Sheryl Gay Stolberg, reporting from Ottawa, Canada, in context here: " target="_blank">www.nytimes.com/2009/02/20/world/americas/20prexy.html?hp
New York Times journalist Ian Austen contributed reporting to this article.

Yes, dear ones, whither activism? My snide remarks for the night

2009-02-20T04:16:00.004-05:00

Each day I travel around Toronto.

I speak to people about corrupt police, the invasion of the surveillance society taking place throughout the city, the feeling of doom - and then watch as yuppies go about their myriad rounds of exercise and beer festivities.

Each day I wonder: what IS it going to "take" to get people motivated to fight back against what is increasing apparent; the fiscal crisis is about to hit HARD right here in Canucksville. The government/media DISSinfo continues. We read about the crash in Buffalo (the backyard) and forget about detainees, torture and WAR CRIMES. Many look away as the homeless sit out and beg on street corners in subzero temperatures, never stopping to ask WHY these people ended up on the street.

Yet something needs to be done, obviously.

"The "old model" of social activism hasn't proved effective,... Changing a light bulb is not an appropriate response" to the climate crisis."

People don't really know how to be effective.

Roger Fisher's: "Making Threats is Not Enough," (ch. 3 in Int'l Conflict 4 Beginners, http://www dot pon.harvard.edu/hnp/writing/books/internationalconflict.shtml) might be a place to begin.

Is an uprising necessary? Is online petitioning, phoning and the usual enough.

A definition of "uprising" would help, Fisher's good on that too. He tells how there were negotiations for arms control inspections but no definition of an inspection. Naturally they didn't get far, though each side had a quite different demand for number of inspections. They argued, but didn't know what over.

There are differences between movements of people who are actually the losers (low wage workers, oppressed groups), and movements of well meaning people who don't really have much to lose. In organizing we're taught to look for the former. They'll stick with you. So, given this, are there any such precedents for what these particular leaders are advocating?

Proactively: I hear nothing here of the key items of good organizing. The picture is of police, but they're irrelevanat to the decision making that makes any real difference. I hear of general attempts to influence, but no focus on the person who decides. I hear nothing of good preparation on that decider.

Tne definite problem is that those severely affected by what is happening are the already disenfranchised: children - who neither vote, pay taxes nor go to war. Or the "mentally ill", who are, afterall PEOPLE.

How do we "mobilize" without alienating those who we need to stand WITH US.

Get a copy of International Mediation (65 action for adjusting as you go). Write your own set of proposals as in the book Dear Israelis, Dear Arabs. All this from Roger Fisher, also much online. Get training in real organizing at NTIC, WORC, etc. and read Shel Trapp, online.

Here's my checklist, from my ZSpace blog (more there).

1. Are we targeting someone who actually makes the decision? Who is the person with the power to decide? (not public, not police)
2. Are we prepared to force them to communicate with us? (Often necessary. Civil disobedience for a purpose?)
3. Are we actually asking the person to do something specific?
4. Is it a winnable step? It doesn’t have to have a greater than 50% chance of being won, just a reasonable chance, suggests Roger Fisher in his books. (This changes if you really work those two chapters (2 & 3) in Beyond Machiavelli, and worksheets in Coping with International Conflict.)
5. Have we thoroughly prepared for this? Fisher’s book, Getting Ready to Negotiate: The Getting To Yes Workbook has a full packet of additional worksheets, including one right up front for assessing where you should start. ... (See worksheets listed at my blog.)
6. Do we know what to do after they “say no?” I find that the approach of wanting to be heard is sometimes followed by quitting after they say no. ...
7. Are we monitoring and documenting their responses and using them as teaching tools? ...
8. Are we running our own meetings with them? ...
9. Are we giving our members the chance to “be there” during negotiations? ...
10. Are we using methods that have been proven, that can win victory steps? ...

Do we need fear arrest? Do we need to back down and "chill" as is the Canadian way? Do we work alone as I do with grave risks attached?

Is it a matter of a quick blitz and then disperse?

Do we stay nonviolent, ala (sellout) Ghandi?

Do we advocate (as one voice) a TENT CITY approach, and that only or focus on only one activity such as calling for the prosecution of George W. BuZh?

Do we focus on ALL actitivites together: "climate change"; the need for a green economy; focus on the fiscal crisis; disgust at the last eight years of militarism, greed, superimperialism; poverty, homelessness, and social breakdown OR do we keep working away at each issue seperate as if stringing together the syllables of the language of dispair would make a coherant sentence in the end?

Will there be disperate groups emerging with anarchists on the extreme fringes, Nationalistic groups, feminists, peace activists and others - each doing there own thing? The SPP was a painful thing to watch - I DESPISED allying with active racists and there were many among that Ron Paul crowd "thang" - yet it produced many fine activities that caught the public eye.

Are we going for attentiong-getting activities, educating people, trying to stop the tyranny or getting together to propose solutions rather than just jawing about The Problem? How do we cut down The Weeds without destroying The Garden? Do we just go along and create more institutionalized protest?

What is happening if far, far worse than even the Vietnam War side effects, which were of course horrific. This is a Global Meltdown but I dont' see much international activism conferences occuring - YET.

All I personally know is that I miss the passion I saw in Andover desperately and that I would like to make some local change in my lifetime by seriously running for City Council to add a voice of dissent in my own locality and I am completely surprised how often I am told it's a Great Idea.

But I would like to see something more than to be undertaken than resort to the same old, same old - go to the ballot box solutions as they just don't seem to cut it, although changing things at the local level is where to start, obviously since it's harder to move things up on the Provincial, Federal or international levels. Been years since the WTO activism and it's going to prove difficult to bring back that fervor as the fear is that much heavier due to the increase in HARDENED cops and police technology.

Whither activism?

Who knows?

US Inflation Could Hit 200%: Dr. Doom

2009-02-20T04:07:00.000-05:00

Some of you may also enjoy these interviews.

In the first (2009) he forecasts major inflation in the US, as a strategy of getting out of debt

In the second (1998) he forcasted a crash due to leveraging, blames globalisation, claims the IMF was doing more harm than good, and has an interesting twist to the explanation of the protracted crisis in Japan (due to cultural reasons related to saving).

Best wishes!
Arno

http://www.cnbc. com/id/29047443

Topics:Currencies | U.S. Dollar | Western Europe | Europe | Africa | Ben Bernanke | Federal Reserve | Politics & Government | Interest Rates | Economy (U.S.) | Inflation | ECB | Italy | The Netherlands | Germany | France | Britain | Economy (Global)
By: CNBC.com | 06 Feb 2009 | 03:28 AM ET
Text Size

The US risks being hit by Zimbabwe-style hyperinflation and there are signs that the world's biggest economy risks turning into a banana republic, Marc Faber, author of the Gloom, Doom & Boom report, told CNBC's "Asia Squawk Box."
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Current DateTime: 11:29:54 16 Feb 2009
LinksList Documentid: 29047514

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"In the US, we have a totally new school, and it’s called the Zimbabwe school," Faber said. "And it’s founded by one of the great leaders of this world, Mr Robert Mugabe, that has managed to totally impoverish his own country. And that is the monetary policy the US is pursuing."

The government's increased intervention in the economy is likely to slow down economic growth because history shows that every time the private sector shrinks to make way for the government sector, the economy suffers, he said.

Asked whether the US risked being faced with 200 percent inflation, Faber answered: "Well, not yet. Not yet. But I think eventually. If I look at government debt in the US, and debt in general, I think the only way they will not default physically on their debt is to inflate."

The Federal Reserve's policy of printing money and the government's intervention in the economy might undermine the US's economic and political clout, Faber warned.

"Well, I wrote two years ago a report entitled 'Is America becoming a banana republic?' And there are some features that characterize banana republics- totalitarian states, very strong government intervention into the economy, and the polarization of wealth," he said.

"And we have all these trends occurring in the US. We are not yet there. And in theory it could be reversed, but I doubt it will be," Faber added.

Because of these factors, US government and corporate bonds, including that of CNBC parent General Electric [GE 11.44 -0.24 (-2.05%) ] , should be downgraded, he said.

"Yeh, I think GE should be a junk bond. But I also think the US government should be junk," Faber said, adding: "I don’t pay much attention to rating agencies. The rating agencies have totally failed over the last 3-4 years to identify sick companies."

© 2009 CNBC.com

http://www.abc. net.au/foreign/ stories/s317734. htm

WORLD IN FOCUS
Interview with Marc Faber

Broadcast: 23/6/1998
Interviewer: George Negus

Transcript:
Faber: (predicting world depression during an earlier interview with George Negus in January 1998) You tell me where it will end? I tell you it will end all in disaster. But will it end in disaster tomorrow...in three months, six months, nine months - that I don't know, but I tell you the whole system is at threat because of the leverage the world is living on....

23/6/98

Negus: Marc when we talked back in January your predictions about the Asian crisis were pretty dire. Given the events of the last couple of weeks, how would your gloom and doom report, if you like, describe the situation in Asia at the moment?

Faber: Well, I think that the Asian economies have essentially collapsed. We have really economic misery which has been compounded by a very high foreign debt level, and when you have your local currency collapsing by fifty percent or eighty percent, as in the case of Indonesia, then obviously your foreign debt becomes extremely burdensome.

Negus: The IMF are predicting an economic contraction in Asia of somewhere between three to five percent, but your report suggests somewhere between ten and fifteen, which is one heck of a discrepancy. Why is your prediction so much more bleak than theirs?

Faber: Well in my opinion the IMF doesn't really understand what they are talking about and they also don't really understand the problems Asia are facing. I'd like to remind you that the IMF had its annual meeting here in September, at which stage they were still quite optimistic about Asia and they thought that the crisis of the Thai baht was unique and that it wouldn't spread or have a contagious impact on the other countries and thereafter everything collapsed. Everywhere in Asia the imports are collapsing by forty to fifty percent. Car sales in Malaysia, in Thailand, Indonesia are down in the order of seventy-five percent... tourism is down twenty-five percent in Hong Kong... So if someone talks about the contraction of just three percent he's dreaming. The contraction is much more severe than that.

Negus: It sounds to me, and I think this was your attitude when I spoke to you earlier this year, that the IMF and other world monetary bodies like the IMF are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Faber: Well, the IMF each time it bails out a country it distorts the market, and it prevents the market from clearing entirely... it's like the Japanese government, by trying to bail out the banks and other financial institutions over the last seven years, has prevented the Japanese economy from clearing entirely, and therefore the pain in Japan... we are now eight years into the recession, it's still there.

Negus: Do you think that Japan should in fact take the measures that are being suggested to them? Do you think they should make the reforms that are being asked of them?

Faber: But you see, the problem is that you go into these countries and you ask them to reform... the problem is that a number of these countries got into trouble because of the reforms they implemented in the first place. As a result of this globalisation drive a lot of countries opened up their financial markets... they opened up their markets for imports, and therefore they began to run very large trade and current account deficits, plus the money kept on coming in and created bubbles, and when the money exited it created these depressions we have today. So to say, yeah let's go and reform... concretely it's not all that easy.. Furthermore, different countries have different cultures. How do you want to force the Japanese to consume? They don't have homes like in America and Australia where you can park three cars in front of your house. They live in very small spaces - so how many beds, TV sets, furniture items can they buy? It's very limited. They consume to some extent by travelling overseas, that they do, but in addition to that if you look at Japan, the decline of interest rates since 1990 had the following impact. Assuming you are a Japanese and you have the equivalent of one million dollars on deposit at seven percent in 1990, and today you're getting one percent, what is your reaction to that?... to spend more, or to save more?

Negus: Is there a simple way to begin solving this problem?

Faber: It took Japan a long time to get into trouble, and it will take a while to get out of trouble. Having said that, if today someone would put a gun on my head and say "either you buy the Dow Jones in the United States, or the Japanese stock market", I would rather buy the Japanese stock market, because at least in Japan you have a country that has a large trade in current account surplus, whereas in the U.S. you have a country that essentially suffers from similar symptoms that the Asian countries suffered before the crisis - mainly large trade and current account deficits - and of course a lot of debt of the U.S is held by foreigners, and if one day the foreigners decide to exit the U.S. dollar and to sell these assets, the market will plunge. The European market and the U.S. market are up in the sky and will have a very rude awakening within the next two years where these markets could easily decline by fifty percent.

Negus: What's your ultimate prognosis - total breakdown, or do you think we'll stumble on for some time to come?

Faber: Well, personally I'm extremely concerned by the growth of wealth inequality in the world. The wealth inequality's manifested on two levels - inequality between the rich countries and the poor countries, which since 1990 has actually increased very dramatically, especially now following the currency devaluations - and wealth inequality in countries themselves. The typical worker in the Western world, or in Australia is today no better off than ten years ago. However, some people who participated in the bull market of financial assets... they have done extremely well. So you have this disparity between the super rich - the type like Bill Gates, who has a worth close to $US50 billion - and the average worker who's real income hasn't increased. And that in my opinion is bad, because the people who actually would like to consume - the workers and the people living in the third world or in developing countries... they don't have the money to consume - whereas the people who have the money, they already own everything, they don't need to consume anything. And therefore this may very well lead, according to the wealth inequality business cycle theory, to a serious economic downturn.

Negus: Marc Faber, it's always good to talk to you... and you've got to learn to say what you really believe, instead of hedging your bets. Thanks again.

Faber: (laughs) I don't think I hedged them too much.

The lastest from Dr. Michael Hudson

2009-02-20T03:53:00.002-05:00

Finance Capitalism Hits a Wall

The Oligarchs’ Escape Plan – at the Treasury’s Expense

By Prof. Michael Hudson

The financial “wealth creation” game is over. Economies emerged from World War II relatively free of debt, but the 60-year global run-up has run its course. Finance capitalism is in a state of collapse, and marginal palliatives cannot revive it. The U.S. economy cannot “inflate its way out of debt,” because this would collapse the dollar and end its dreams of global empire by forcing foreign countries to go their own way. There is too little manufacturing to make the economy more “competitive,” given its high housing costs, transportation, debt and tax overhead. A quarter to a third of U.S. real estate has fallen into Negative Equity, so no banks will lend to them. The economy has hit a debt wall and is falling into Negative Equity, where it may remain for as far as the eye can see until there is a debt write-down.

February 18, 2009 "Global Research" -- - Mr. Obama’s “recovery” plan based on infrastructure spending will make real estate fortunes for well-situated properties along the new public transport routes, but there is no sign of cities levying a windfall property tax to save their finances. Their mayors would rather keep the cities broke than to tax real estate and finance. The aim is to re-inflate property markets to enable owners to pay the banks, not to help the public sector break even. So state and local pension plans will remain underfunded while more corporate pension plans go broke.

One would think that politicians would be willing to do the math and realize that debts that can’t be paid, won’t be. But the debts are being kept on the books, continuing to extract interest to pay the creditors that have made the bad loans. The resulting debt deflation threatens to keep the economy in depression until a radical shift in policy occurs – a shift to save the “real” economy, not just the financial sector and the wealthiest 10% of American families.

There is no sign that Mr. Obama’s economic advisors, Treasury officials and heads of the relevant Congressional committees recognize the need for a write-down. After all, they have been placed in their positions precisely because they do not understand that debt leveraging is a form of economic overhead, not real “wealth creation.” But their tunnel vision is what makes them “reliable” to Wall Street, which doesn’t like surprises. And the entire character of today’s financial crisis continues to be labeled “surprising” and “unexpected” by the press as each new surprisingly pessimistic statistic hits the news. It’s safe to be surprised; suspicious to have expected bad news and being a “premature doomsayer.” One must have faith in the system above all. And the system was the Greenspan Bubble. That is why “Ayn Rand Alan” was put in charge in the first place, after all.

So the government tries to recover the happy Bubble Economy years by getting debt growing again, hoping to re-inflate real estate and stock market prices. That was, after all, the Golden Age of finance capital’s world of using debt leverage to bid up the book-price of fictitious capital assets. Everyone loved it as long as it lasted. Voters thought they had a chance to become millionaires, and approved happily. And at least it made Wall Street richer than ever before – while almost doubling the share of wealth held by the wealthiest 1% of America’s families. For Washington policy makers, they are synonymous with “the economy” – at least the economy for which national economic policy is being formulated these days.

The Obama-Geithner plan to restart the Bubble Economy’s debt growth so as to inflate asset prices by enough to pay off the debt overhang out of new “capital gains” cannot possibly work. But that is the only trick these ponies know. We have entered an era of asset-price deflation, not inflation. Economic data charts throughout the world have hit a wall and every trend has been plunging vertically downward since last autumn. U.S. consumer prices experienced their fastest plunge since the Great Depression of the 1930s, along with consumer “confidence,” international shipping, real estate and stock market prices, oil and the exchange rate for British sterling. The global economy is falling into depression, and cannot recover until debts are written down.

Instead of doing this, the government is doing just the opposite. It is proposing to take bad debts onto the public-sector balance sheet, printing new Treasury bonds give the banks – bonds whose interest charges will have to be paid by taxing labor and industry.

The oligarchy’s plans for a bailout (at least of its own financial position)

In periods of looming collapse, wealthy elites protect their funds like rats fleeing a sinking ship. In times past they bought gold when currencies started to weaken. (Patriotism never has been a characteristic of cosmopolitan finance capital.) Since the 1950s the International Monetary Fund has made loans to support Third World exchange rates long enough to subsidize capital flight. In the United States over the past half-year, bankers and Wall Street investors have tapped the Treasury and Federal Reserve to support prices of their bad loans and financial gambles, buying out or guaranteeing $12 trillion of these junk debts. Protection for the U.S. financial elite thus takes the form of domestic public debt, not foreign currency.

It is all in vain as far as the real economy is concerned. When the Treasury gives banks newly printed government bonds in “cash for trash” swaps, it leaves today’s unpayably high private-sector debt in place. All that happens is that this debt is now owed to (or guaranteed by) the government, which will have to impose taxes to pay the interest charges.

The new twist is a variant on the IMF “stabilization” plans that lend money to central banks to support their currencies – for long enough to enable local oligarchs and foreign investors to move their savings and investments offshore at a good exchange rate. The currency then is permitted to collapse, enabling currency speculators to rake in enough gains to empty out the central bank’s reserves. Speculators view these central bank holdings as a target to be raided – the larger the better. The IMF will lend a central bank, say, $10 billion to “support the currency.” Domestic holders will flee the currency at a high exchange rate. Then, when the loan proceeds are depleted, the currency plunges. Wages are squeezed in the usual IMF austerity program, and the economy is forced to earn enough foreign exchange to pay back the IMF.

As a condition for getting this kind of IMF “support,” governments are told to run a budget surplus, cut back social spending, lower wages and raise taxes on labor so as to squeeze out enough exports to repay the IMF loans. But inasmuch as this kind “stabilization plan” cripples their domestic economy, they are obliged to sell off public infrastructure at distress prices – to foreign buyers who themselves borrow the money. The effect is to make such countries even more dependent on less “neoliberalized” economies.

Latvia is a poster child for this kind of disaster. Its recent agreement with Europe is a case in point. To help the Swedish banks withdraw their funds from the sinking ship, EU support is conditional on Latvia’s government agreeing to cut salaries in the private sector – and not to raise property taxes (currently almost zero).

The problem is that Latvia, like other post-Soviet economies, has scant domestic output to export. Industry throughout the former Soviet Union was torn up and scrapped in the 1990s. (Welcome to victorious finance capitalism, Western-style.) What they had was real estate and public infrastructure free of debt – and hence, available to be pledged as collateral for loans to finance their imports. Ever since its independence from Russia in 1991, Latvia has paid for its imported consumer goods and other purchases by borrowing mortgage credit in foreign currency from Scandinavian and other banks. The effect has been one of the world’s biggest property bubbles – in an economy with no means of breaking even except by loading down its real estate with more and more debt. In practice the loans took the form of mortgage borrowing from foreign banks to finance a real estate bubble – and their import dependency on foreign suppliers.

So instead of helping it and other post-Soviet nations develop self-reliant economies, the West has viewed them as economic oysters to be broken up to indebt them in order to extract interest charges and capital gains, leaving them empty shells. This policy crested on January 26, 2009, when Joaquin Almunia of the European Commission wrote a letter to Latvia’s Prime Minister spelling out the terms on which Europe will bail out the Swedish and other foreign banks operating in Latvia – at Latvia’s own expense:

Extended assistance is to be used to avoid a balance of payments crisis, which requires … restoring confidence in the banking sector [now entirely foreign owned], and bolstering the foreign reserves of the Bank of Latvia. This implies financing … outstanding government debt repayments (domestic and external). And if the banking sector were to experience adverse events, part of the assistance would be used for targeted capital infusions or appropriate short-term liquidity support. However, financial assistance is not meant to be used to originate new loans to businesses and households. …

… it is important not to raise ungrounded expectations among the general public and the social partners, and, equally, to counter misunderstandings that may arise in this respect. Worryingly, we have witnessed some recent evidence in Latvian public debate of calls for part of the financial assistance to be used inter alia for promoting export industries or to stimulate the economy through increased spending at large. It is important actively to stem these misperceptions.

Riots broke out last week, and protesters stormed the Latvian Treasury. Hardly surprising! There is no attempt to help Latvia develop the export capacity to cover its imports. After the domestic kleptocrats, foreign banks and investors have removed their funds from the economy, the Latvian lat will be permitted to depreciate. Foreign buyers then can come in and pick up local assets on the cheap once again.

The practice of European banks riding the crest of the post-Soviet real estate bubble is backfiring to wreck the European economies that have engaged in this predatory lending to neighboring economies as well. As one reporter has summarized:

In Poland 60 percent of mortgages are in Swiss francs. The zloty has just halved against the franc. Hungary, the Balkans, the Baltics, and Ukraine are all suffering variants of this story. As an act of collective folly – by lenders and borrowers – it matches America’s sub-prime debacle. There is a crucial difference, however. European banks are on the hook for both. US banks are not. Almost all East bloc debts are owed to West Europe, especially Austrian, Swedish, Greek, Italian, and Belgian banks.1

This was the West’s alternative to Stalinism. It did not help these countries emulate how Britain and America got rich by protectionist policies and publicly nurtured industrialization and infrastructure spending. Rather, the financial rape and industrial dismantling of the former Soviet economies was the most recent exercise in Western colonialism. At least U.S. investors were smart enough to stand clear and merely ride the stock market run-up before jumping ship.

But now, the government’s plan to “save” the economy is to “save the banks,” along similar lines to the West trying to save its banks from their adventure in the post-Soviet economies. This is the basic neoliberal economic plan, after all. The U.S. economy is about to be “post-Sovietized.”

The U.S. giveaway to banks, masquerading as “help for troubled homeowners”

The Obama bank bailout is arranged much like an IMF loan to support the exchange rate of foreign currency, but with the Treasury supporting financial asset prices for U.S. banks and other financial institutions. Instead of banks and oligarchs abandoning the dollar, the aim is to enable them to dump their bad mortgages and CDOs and get domestic Treasury bonds. Private-sector debt will be moved onto the U.S. Government balance sheet, where “taxpayers” will bear losses – mainly labor not Wall Street, inasmuch as the financial sector has been freed of income-tax liability by the “small print” in last autumn’s Paulson-Bush bailout package. But at least the U.S. Government is handling the situation entirely in domestic dollars.

As in Third World austerity programs, the effect of keeping the debts in place at the “real” economy’s expense will be to shrink the domestic U.S. market – while providing opportunities for hedge funds to pick up depreciated assets cheaply as the federal government, states and cities sell them off. This is called letting the banks “earn their way out of debt.” It’s strangling the “real” economy, because not a dollar of the government’s response has been devoted to reducing the overall debt volume.

Take the much-vaunted $50 billion program designed to renegotiate mortgages downward for “troubled homeowners.” Upon closer examination it turns out that the real beneficiaries are the giant leading banks such as Citibank and Bank of America that have made the bad loans. The Treasury will take on the bad debt that banks are stuck with, and will permit mortgagees to renegotiate their monthly payment down to 38% of their income. But rather than the banks taking the loss as they should do for over-lending, the Treasury itself will make up the difference – and pay it to the banks so that they will be able to get what they hoped to get. The hapless mortgage-burdened family stuck in their negative-equity home turns out to be merely a passive vehicle for the Treasury to pass debt relief on to the commercial banks.

Few news stories have made this clear, but the Financial Times spelled the details buried in small print.2 It added that the Treasury has not yet decided whether to write down the debt principal for the estimated 15 million families with negative equity (and perhaps 30 million by this time next year as property prices continue to plunge). No doubt a similar deal will be made: For every $100,000 of write-down in debt owed by over-mortgaged homeowners, the bank will receive $100,000 from the Treasury. Government debt will rise by $100,000, and the process will continue until the Treasury has transferred $50,000,000 to the banks that made the reckless loans.

There is enough for just 500 of these renegotiations of $100,000 each. Hardly enough to make much of a dent, but the principle has been put in place for many further bailouts. It will take almost an infinity of them, as long as the Treasury tries to support the fiction that “the miracle of compound interest” can be sustained for long. The danger is the economy may be dead by the time saner economic understanding penetrates the public consciousness. In the mean time, bad private-sector debt will be shifted onto the government’s balance sheet. Interest and amortization currently owed to the banks will be replaced by obligations to the U.S. Treasury. Taxes will be levied to make up the bad debts with which the government is stuck. The “real” economy will pay Wall Street – and will be paying for decades!

Calling the $12 trillion giveaway to bankers a “subprime crisis” makes it appear that bleeding-heart liberals got Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into trouble by insisting that these public-private institutions make irresponsible loans to the poor. The party line is, “Blame the victim.” But we know this is false. The bulk of bad loans are concentrated in the largest banks. It was Countrywide and other banksters that led the irresponsible lending and brought heavy-handed pressure on Fannie Mae. Most of the nation’s smaller, local banks didn’t make such reckless loans. The big mortgage shops didn’t care about loan quality, because they were run by salesmen. The Treasury is paying off the gamblers and billionaires by supporting the value of bank loans, investments and derivative gambles, leaving the Treasury in debt.

U.S./post-Soviet Convergence?

It may be time to look once again at what Larry Summers and his Rubinomics gang did in Russia in the mid-1990s and to Third World countries during his tenure as World Bank economist to see what kind of future is being planned for the U.S. economy over the next few years. Throughout the Soviet Union the neoliberal model established “equilibrium” in a way that involved demographic collapse: shortening life spans, lower birth rates, alcoholism and drug abuse, psychological depression, suicides, bad health, unemployment and homelessness for the elderly (the neoliberal mode of Social Security reform).

Back in the 1970s, people speculated whether the US and Soviet economies were converging. Throughout the 20^th century, of course, everyone expected government regulation, infrastructure investment and planning to increase. It looked like the spread of democratically elected governments would go hand in hand with people voting in their own economic interest to raise living standards, thereby closing the inequality gap.

This is not the kind of convergence that has occurred since 1991. Government power is being dismantled, living standards have stagnated and wealth is concentrating at the top of the economic pyramid. Economic planning and resource allocation has passed into the hands of Wall Street, whose alternative to Hayek’s “road to serfdom” is debt peonage for the economy at large. There does need to be a strong state, to be sure, to keep the financial and real estate rentier power in place. But the West’s alternative to the old Soviet bureaucracy is a financial planning. In place of a political overhead, we have a financial and real estate overhead.

Stalinist Russia and Maoist China achieved high technology without land-rent, monopoly rent and interest overhead. This purging of rentier income was the historical task of classical political economy, and it became that of socialism. The aim was to create a Clean Slate financially, bringing prices in line with technologically necessary costs of production. The aim was to provide everyone with the fruits of their labor rather than letting banks and landlords siphon off the economic surplus.

Ideas of economic efficiency and “wealth creation” today are an utterly different kind of liberalism and “free markets.” Commercial banks lend money not to increase production but to inflate asset prices. Some 70% of bank loans are mortgage loans for real estate, and most of the rest is for corporate takeovers and raids, to finance stock buy-backs or simply to pay dividends. Asset-price inflation obliges people to go deeper into debt than ever before to obtain access to housing, education and medical care. The economy is being “financialized,” not industrialized. This has been the plan as much for the post-Soviet states as for North America, Western Europe and the Third World.

But we are far from having reached the end of the line. Celebrations that our present financialized economy represents the “end of history” are laughingly premature. Today’s policies look more like a dead end. But that does not mean that, like the Roman Empire, they won’t lead us down toward a new Dark Age. That’s what tends to happen when oligarchies do the planning.

Is America a Failed Economy?

It may be time to ask whether neoliberal pro-rentier economics has turned America and the West into a Failed Economy. Is there really no alternative? Have the neoliberals made the shift of planning from governments to the financial oligarchy irreversible?

Let’s first dispose of the “foundation myth” of the idea still guiding the United States and Europe. Free-market economists pretend that prices can be brought into line most efficiently with technologically necessary costs of production under capitalism, and indeed, under finance capitalism. The banks and stock market are supposed to allocate resources most efficiency. That at least is the dream of self-regulating markets. But today it looks like only a myth, public relations patter talk to get a generation of increasingly indebted voters not to act in their own self-interest.

Industrial capitalism always has been a hybrid, a symbiosis with its feudal legacy of absentee property ownership, oligarchic finance and public debts rather than the government acting as net creditor. The essence of feudalism was extractive, not productive. That is why it created industrial capitalism as State Policy in the first place – if only to increase its war-making powers. But the question must now be raised as to whether only socialism can complete the historical task that classical political economy set out for itself – the ideal that futurists in the 19^th and 20^th centuries believed that an unpurified capitalism might still be able bring about without shedding its legacy of commercial banking indebting property and carving infrastructure out of the public domain.

Today it is easier to see that the Western economies cannot go on the way they have been. They have reached the point where the debts exceed the ability to pay. Instead of recognizing this fact and scaling debts back into line with the ability to pay, the Obama-Geithner plan is to bail out the big banks and hedge funds, keeping the volume of debt in place and indeed, growing once again through the “magic of compound interest.” The result can only be an increasingly extractive economy, until households, real estate and industrial companies, states and cities, and the national government itself is driven into debt peonage.

The alternative is a century and a half old, and emerged out of the ideals of the classical economic doctrines of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, and the last great classical economist, Marx. Their common denominator was to view rent and interest are extractive, not productive. Classical political economy and its successor Progressive Era socialism sought to nationalize the land (or at least to fully tax its rent as the fiscal base). Governments were to create their own credit, not leave this function to wealthy elites via a bank monopoly on credit creation. So today’s neoliberalism paints a false picture of what the classical economists envisioned as free markets. They were markets free of economic rent and interest (and taxes to support an aristocracy or oligarchy). Socialism was to free economies from these overhead charges. Today’s Obama-Geithner rescue plan is just the reverse.

NOTES

1 Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, “If Eastern Europe falls, world is next,” The Telegraph, February 14, 2009.

2 Krishna Guha, “US closes in on subsidy plan to stop foreclosures,” Financial Times, February 13, 2009.

2009-02-20T03:49:00.002-05:00

Obama’s War on Terror May Resemble Bush’s in Some Areas

Michael Temchine for The New York Times

Leon F. Panetta opened a loophole in the Obama administration’s interrogation restrictions while testifying before a Senate panel this month

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

Published: February 17, 2009

WASHINGTON — Even as it pulls back from harsh interrogations and other sharply debated aspects of George W. Bush’s “war on terrorism,” the Obama administration is quietly signaling continued support for other major elements of its predecessor’s approach to fighting Al Qaeda

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Last month, protesters called for the closing of the prison at Guantánamo Bay.

In little-noticed confirmation testimony recently, Obama nominees endorsed continuing the C.I.A.’s program of transferring prisoners to other countries without legal rights, and indefinitely detaining terrorism suspects without trials even if they were arrested far from a war zone.

The administration has also embraced the Bush legal team’s arguments that a lawsuit by former C.I.A. detainees should be shut down based on the “state secrets” doctrine. It has also left the door open to resuming military commission trials.

And earlier this month, after a British court cited pressure by the United States in declining to release information about the alleged torture of a detainee in American custody, the Obama administration issued a statement thanking the British government “for its continued commitment to protect sensitive national security information.”

These and other signs suggest that the administration’s changes may turn out to be less sweeping than many had hoped or feared — prompting growing worry among civil liberties groups and a sense of vindication among supporters of Bush-era policies.

In an interview, the White House counsel, Gregory B. Craig, asserted that the administration was not embracing Mr. Bush’s approach to the world. But Mr. Craig also said President Obama intended to avoid any “shoot from the hip” and “bumper sticker slogans” approaches to deciding what to do with the counterterrorism policies he inherited.

“We are charting a new way forward, taking into account both the security of the American people and the need to obey the rule of law,” Mr. Craig said. “That is a message we would give to the civil liberties people as well as to the Bush people.”

Within days of his inauguration, Mr. Obama thrilled civil liberties groups when he issued executive orders promising less secrecy, restricting C.I.A. interrogators to Army Field Manual techniques, shuttering the agency’s secret prisons, ordering the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, closed within a year and halting military commission trials.

But in more recent weeks, things have become murkier.

During her confirmation hearing last week, Elena Kagan, the nominee for solicitor general, said that someone suspected of helping finance Al Qaeda should be subject to battlefield law — indefinite detention without a trial — even if he were captured in a place like the Philippines rather than in a physical battle zone.

Ms. Kagan’s support for an elastic interpretation of the “battlefield” amplified remarks that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. made at his own confirmation hearing. And it dovetailed with a core Bush position. Civil liberties groups argue that people captured away from combat zones should go to prison only after trials.

Moreover, the nominee for C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, opened a loophole in Mr. Obama’s interrogation restrictions. At his hearing, Mr. Panetta said that if the approved techniques were “not sufficient” to get a detainee to divulge details he was suspected of knowing about an imminent attack, he would ask for “additional authority.”

To be sure, Mr. Panetta emphasized that the president could not bypass antitorture statutes, as Bush lawyers claimed. And he said that waterboarding — a technique that induces the sensation of drowning, and that the Bush administration said was lawful — is torture.

But Mr. Panetta also said the C.I.A. might continue its “extraordinary rendition” program, under which agents seize terrorism suspects and take them to other countries without extradition proceedings, in a more sweeping form than anticipated.

Before the Bush administration, the program primarily involved taking indicted suspects to their native countries for legal proceedings. While some detainees in the 1990s were allegedly abused after transfer, under Mr. Bush the program expanded and included transfers to third countries — some of which allegedly used torture — for interrogation, not trials.

Mr. Panetta said the agency is likely to continue to transfer detainees to third countries and would rely on diplomatic assurances of good treatment — the same safeguard the Bush administration used, and that critics say is ineffective.

Mr. Craig noted that while Mr. Obama decided “not to change the status quo immediately,” he created a task force to study “rendition policy and what makes sense consistent with our obligation to protect the country.”

He urged patience as the administration reviewed the programs it inherited from Mr. Bush. That process began after the election, Mr. Craig said, when military and C.I.A. leaders flew to Chicago for a lengthy briefing of Mr. Obama and his national security advisers. Mr. Obama then sent his advisers to C.I.A. headquarters to “find out the best case for continuing the practices that had been employed during the Bush administration.”

Civil liberties groups praise Mr. Obama’s early executive orders on national security, but say other signs are discouraging.

For example, Mr. Obama’s Justice Department last week told an appeals court that the Bush administration was right to invoke “state secrets” to shut down a lawsuit by former C.I.A. detainees who say a Boeing subsidiary helped fly them to places where they were tortured.

Margaret Satterthwaite, a faculty director at the human rights center at the New York University law school, said, “It was literally just Bush redux — exactly the same legal arguments that we saw the Bush administration present to the court.”

Mr. Craig said Mr. Holder and others reviewed the case and “came to the conclusion that it was justified and necessary for national security” to maintain their predecessor’s stance. Mr. Holder has also begun a review of every open Bush-era case involving state secrets, Mr. Craig said, so people should not read too much into one case.

“Every president in my lifetime has invoked the state-secrets privilege,” Mr. Craig said. “The notion that invoking it in that case somehow means we are signing onto the Bush approach to the world is just an erroneous assumption.”

Still, the decision caught the attention of a bipartisan group of lawmakers. Two days after the appeals court hearing, they filed legislation to bar using the state-secrets doctrine to shut down an entire case — as opposed to withholding particular evidence.

The administration has also put off taking a stand in several cases that present opportunities to embrace or renounce Bush-era policies, including the imprisonment without trial of an “enemy combatant” on domestic soil, Freedom of Information Act lawsuits seeking legal opinions about interrogation and surveillance, and an executive-privilege dispute over Congressional subpoenas of former White House aides to Mr. Bush over the firing of United States attorneys.

Addressing the executive-privilege dispute, Mr. Craig said: “The president is very sympathetic to those who want to find out what happened. But he is also mindful as president of the United States not to do anything that would undermine or weaken the institution of the presidency. So for that reason, he is urging both sides of this to settle.”

The administration’s recent policy moves have attracted praise from outspoken defenders of the Bush administration. Last Friday, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page argued that “it seems that the Bush administration’s antiterror architecture is gaining new legitimacy” as Mr. Obama’s team embraces aspects of Mr. Bush’s counterterrorism approach.

Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the sequence of “disappointing” recent events had heightened concerns that Mr. Obama might end up carrying forward “some of the most problematic policies of the Bush presidency.”

Mr. Obama has clashed with civil libertarians before. Last July, he voted to authorize eavesdropping on some phone calls and e-mail messages without a warrant. While the A.C.L.U. says the program is still unconstitutional, the legislation reduced legal concerns about one of the most controversial aspects of Mr. Bush’s antiterror strategy.

“We have been some of the most articulate and vociferous critics of the way the Bush administration handled things,” Mr. Craig said. “There has been a dramatic change of direction.”

2009-02-20T03:41:00.003-05:00

Confessions of a Guantanamo guard

Detention. Humiliation. Torture. The world can only guess atthe horrors of Camp X-Ray. But now Brandon Neely, a former guard, wants to tell the shocking story of what happened there – and why it shames America.

Interview by Almerindo Ojeda

Wednesday, 18 February 2009

Tell me a bit about your life before you joined the military; where were you born and grew up, why and when you enrolled, and so on?

I can remember being 16 years old and telling my parents that I would never join the military. Even though I was raised in a military household, my father did not bring the army home with him. The military was not something our parents wanted us to do. We were always told: “College first and, if you want the military after that, it will be there afterwards.”

I graduated high school in 1998 with no plans whatsoever for my future. I was not ready for college. I was not mature enough and I knew that I could have went, but I for sure would have wasted my parents’ money. For two years I didn’t do much other than hang out and work at a local grocery store stocking groceries 40 hours a week

'We did not receive any kind of special training for working at Guantanamo. No one in the company knew what was really going on' said former Guantanamo prison guard Brandon Neely of his time serving at Camp X-Ray

n June of 2000 I woke up one day and decided I was going to join the army as a military police officer. I knew that I needed to do something with my life. I was not sure what yet, but I knew the military would help me grow up and give me some options for my future.

It is striking how specific your decision to join the Military Police was?

Law enforcement was something I was always drawn to. It was a field I had hoped to get into ever since I was a child. At the age of seven or eight, while we were in Fort Knox, Kentucky, I was out back down the hill with a couple friends playing in the dirt. Suddenly, these two MPs came running our way chasing this guy for some reason. One of them stopped and asked us where we lived and took us home. I can remember then saying: “One day I would like to be that guy.”

What are some of the strongest memories you have of your training period?

The very first day I arrived to my basic training company, all we had was the uniform on our back and two duffel bags. Once the doors on the cattle truck were shut, you quickly knew who was in charge. The drill sergeants were yelling: “Get your face in your duffel bag,” as to say: “Don’t look at me! Look down!” I looked over to my right and noticed a guy opening his duffel bag and literally putting his head inside the bag. It was very hard not to laugh, but I restrained from doing so.

Once we arrived to the company area the doors on the truck came swinging open and there stood more drill sergeants screaming to get off the truck. Having the two duffel bags, we were instructed to put one duffel on the front of us and lay the second one horizontal on top of that. Once I did this – me not being the tallest guy in the world – I could not see where I was going. All of a sudden I came to a halt. I had ran into something or someone. My top duffel bag fell to the ground and that is when I noticed I had ran into the back of a drill sergeant who was in the middle of yelling at someone else. His attention quickly turned in my direction, yelling: “What the hell is wrong with you? What platoon are you going to, private?” I replied: “1st Platoon, Drill Sergeant.” “Not anymore you are; you are coming to 4th Platoon with me now,” he said. This is when I totally realised I was no longer a civilian. I was property of the United States Army.

Where were you on 11 September 2001?

I was in Fort Hood, Texas, assigned to the 410th Military Police Company. I was getting dressed for the day after PT when someone came in my barracks room saying: “Get over here and see the TV.” We were told to grab our Kevlars and our gear and grab our M4 rifles and M9mm out of the armoury, and that the United States was under attack by terrorists.

We were locked and load. I was placed with other MPs at the east side entrance of Fort Hood, where we searched every vehicle and person coming on to post. I was ready for revenge. I was angry. I was ready to go to war. Someone or something had attacked my country, and I believed people needed to be held responsible for this.

What was your next assignment?

My company went to Egypt in late September for a training exercise known as Operation Bright Star. On 5 January 2002, I went out with a couple buddies. We were all at a local club just having a good ol’ time when my cellphone rang. It was my platoon sergeant telling me to get back to the company ASAP. Once I arrived back to the platoon office I was told I had been selected to go to the 401st Military Police Company and deploy. I was to report there at 0700 hours the next morning for more details.

The next day I was told that we would be deploying to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, within the next 24 hours. It was not until later that afternoon that we were told that we would be starting and running a detainee facility, not an EPW (enemy prisoner of war) camp. We were told that a detainee camp had never been ran before, and that this would be the first time in history this had taken place since these people would not fall under the Geneva Convention.

Later that night we finished packing. I called back home to tell my folks that I would be leaving in the morning and would not be back for at least six months. I went and showered and just laid there that Saturday night, nervous and very anxious, wondering what I was getting myself into. I just kept thinking about what we were told all day – that we were going to come face to face with some of the worst people the world had to offer, and that these were the people who had attacked and killed so many people in our country.

Early the next morning, 7 January 2002, we loaded up on the buses to the airstrip and boarded the plane to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

It doesn’t seem you received a lot of training for your Guantanamo assignment. Did you receive any training on the Geneva Conventions during your basic training?

We did not receive any kind of special training for working at Guantanamo. Nor did we receive any kind of real training on what would happen once we got there and the detainees starting arriving. No one from the top down in the company knew what was really going on or what to expect. We went out on a trial-and-error basis. As far as the Geneva Conventions, we touched very shortly on that in training. Most of what people knew about them was from their own readings.

Can you describe your arrival in Guantanamo?

We arrived in Guantanamo early on the afternoon of 7 January 2002. Coming from Texas in January it was quite cold, so everyone had their field jackets and cold weather BDUs [battle dress] on. Once we got off that plane I quickly realised I was not in Texas anymore. It was warm. Very warm, from what I remember. Here we were, dressed for cold weather, carrying all these weapons like we were going to a fight a war somewhere. All the Navy guys who were stationed there and in charge on in-processing us just kind of chuckled. We quickly turned our weapons in to the local armoury where they would stay for the next six months.

During the bus ride we drove right through the naval base. I remember seeing all the post, housing the BX (or Base Exchange), McDonald’s, bowling alley, the gym. I remember thinking, “Man! This is going to be a really nice deployment. We have all we need.” But we kept driving further and further, until there was nothing around us anymore, and in the distance you could see all these tents lined up in a row? I laid down that first night not knowing at all what to expect. No one knew what really was going on.

How did you spend the rest of your time before the detainees arrived?

The next day brought us nothing. We just sat around in our tents and slept most of the day. On 9 January, we all got together and marched down to Camp X-Ray and walked around for a quick tour. It was nothing like I had ever seen before. The cells – or cages as I call them – were small. “Something like you would put a dog in,” I thought. And, on top of that, it was all outdoors. Except for a small metal roof. The whole camp was rocks. No matter where you stepped you were stepping on rocks. But, “Oh well,” I thought, I was not going to be staying in there.

We started our training with the Marine correctional officers. I was placed with the group that would be doing the guarding. Since we were all MPs we were pretty well trained in handcuffing. But we covered it anyways: how to properly handcuff and [use] leg shackles. Over and over. We went over escorting procedures. It was a two-man job; one of the people escorting would force the detainee’s head down while we walked so he could not see where he was going.

Some of us also went through the five-man internal reaction force training. This team would be called upon supposedly when a detainee was out of control. The No 1 Man would have the shield. Once the cage door was open he would go in and hit the detainee as hard as he could with the shield. No 2 Man would go in and gain control of the detainee’s left arm; No 3 Man would gain control of the right arm; No 4 Man would go for the left leg, and No 5 Man would go for the right leg, take him down, and handcuff him. This training went on for the next two days and, on 10 January, we were told that the first batch of detainees would be arriving sometime the next day, so we would be on standby the next day.

Did you get any briefing on who the soon-to-arrive prisoners were?

The only thing I can recall being told about the detainees that would arrive was that they were captured fighting the Americans in Afghanistan. And that they were known terrorists. And that many of them helped in the planning of the 9/11 attacks. We would be coming face-to-face with the worst people the world had to offer. Our mission would be to guard these terrorists so the United States could get more info on attacks and, possibly, stop more terrorist attacks.

As to us, we talked a lot about the detainees before they arrived. About them and what they had probably been involved in. A lot of us, including myself, were pissed off, and many people were out to get revenge for the havoc the United States had been through in recent months by these people.

But, as the months went on, one or two of us would question what was going on here, the way the detainees were being treated, and if they were actually terrorists or not, but being no ones, and young, and dumb, we never questioned anything further; just did our time until we went home.

So 11 January 2002 finally arrives. This is the day the first batch of detainees would arrive. What was the atmosphere like that day?

Everyone, including myself, was very nervous. We did not know when or how many detainees would be arriving that day to Camp X-Ray. I was on standby. After waiting a couple hours we got the call that the detainees were at the airstrip and being loaded up to bring to the camp. I started getting really nervous; almost scared. I keep thinking: “Here it comes; I am fixing to see what a terrorist looks like face-to-face.” You could literally hear a pin drop moments before that bus full of detainees arrived.

Marine Humvees with .50-calibre guns mounted on them led the bus to the camp. The bus doors opened. You could hear the Marines screaming at them: “Shut the fuck up! You’re property of the United States of America now.” We were not allowed to step on to the bus. The Marines would push them towards us down the bus stairs and we would catch them. The first person who got off the bus, I will never forget. It was a man with one leg. He was later called Stumpy by everyone. I don’t know his name, but he was around 5ft 7in and at least 250lb. He was the biggest guy we had for a long time. Grabbed by the escorting MPs, Stumpy was jumping on one leg, MPs screaming at him to walk faster towards the holding area when, from inside the bus, someone threw his prosthetic leg out on to the ground. Myself and my partner were next. The second detainee came off the bus. We grabbed him like we were trained and took him into the holding area, yelling at him to get on his knees and to shut up.

Also in this bunch of detainees was an Australian. We were told he was a mercenary caught fighting against the Americans in Afghanistan. His name was David Hicks. Throughout the months I would talk to him plenty of times and hear his story, along with many others, including that of Feroz Ali Abbasi. He was British and was held on Bravo Block along with David Hicks.

How did the in-processing take place?

After all the detainees were in the holding pen, half of the teams would take them out of the holding pen and bring them into the tent to be in-processed. One by one the detainees were taken from the holding area to the back side of the camp, where in-processing happened very quickly. Ear muffs, goggles and masks were taken off, their pictures were taken, and ID bracelets were made and placed on their wrists. Then the goggles and the surgical mask were placed back on until they got to their cages.

Once in the cages? they were given two buckets (one for water and one to use as a toilet), a green army mat, a small toothbrush, and a sheet.

Did any of the detainees arrive with serious injuries?

Later that day, after my shift was over, the detainees would be taken out of their cages and go through some sort of physical examination, as many of them had injuries. I don’t necessarily remember the injuries of the detainees of the first group, but many of them came with injuries such as gunshot wounds, broken arms, legs.

One injury that sticks out in my mind was on a very slight, malnourished detainee, who had been grazed by a .50 calibre fighting the Americans in Afghanistan (supposedly). He arrived with the first or the second batch of detainees. When he arrived, his right arm was in a sling. I took him to medical a couple times throughout my time at Camp X-Ray. I will try to explain his injury as best as I can. Take your arm and fold it like it was in a sling against your chest. The hole was in his bicep area. Due to the fact his arm was in a sling, and in that position so long, the muscle had attached to his forearm somewhat, and he would go to medical so they could stretch it out. It was a very painful time every time he went.

How did your day end?

After we got off that day, it was late. No one really spoke much. I went back to my tent and laid down to go to sleep. I was thinking: “Those were the worst people the world had to offer? Not what I expected.” I guess I was expecting people who looked like monsters or what-not.

So much happened on that very first day? A lot of it is a blur.

I am very ashamed to admit it and tell you that I was involved in the very first IRFing (internal reaction force) incident at Camp X-Ray. On the first day we had been taking detainees from the in-processing centre to their cages for quite a while when myself and the guy that was my escorting partner grabbed the next detainee to be taken. He was probably in his mid to late fifties – short and kind of husky build. I remember grabbing him and then starting to walk first through the rocks and then through the sally port [a long walkway with gates on both sides] heading towards Alpha Block. Then I noticed he was really tense, shaking really bad, and not wanting to walk or move without being forced to do so. We made our way to Alpha Block, to the cage he would be placed in. He was instructed to go to his knees, which he did. My partner then went down and took off his leg shackles. I still had control of his upper body, and I could still feel him tensing up. Once the shackles were off my partner started to take off the handcuffs. The detainee got really tense and started to pull away. We yelled at him: “Stop moving!” Over and over. Then he stopped moving, and when my partner went to put the key in that first handcuff, the detainee jerked hard to the left towards me. Before I knew it, I threw the detainee to the ground and was on top of him holding his face to the cement floor.

At this time my partner had left the cage. The block NCOIC [Non-Commissioned Officer in Charge] was on the radio yelling code red, which meant emergency on the block. Before I knew, I was grabbed from behind and pulled out of the cage by the IRF team. They grabbed this man and hog-tied him. He laid there like that for hours before he was released from that position.

A couple days later, I found out from a detainee who was on that block that the older detainee was just scared and that when we placed him on his knees he thought he was going to be executed. He went on to tell me that this man had seen some of his friends and family members executed on their knees. I can remember guys coming up to me after it was over that night and said: “Man, that was a good job; you got you some.”

I did not feel good about what I did. It felt wrong. This man was old enough to be my father, and I had just beaten up on him. I still to this day don’t know who was more scared before and during this incident, me or the detainee. I remember seeing him the next day when I walked into camp. His face was all bruised and scraped up. I was young and didn’t question anything back then. As I do nowadays. But even then, when I was as pissed off as anyone there, I felt ashamed of what I did. As the years have went on and the more I learn, the more guilt I feel. This is one of the incidents from my time at Guantanamo that haunts me.

Any incidents of abuse soon after the arrival of detainees?

One night I was assigned to Charlie Block as a block guard. The medic was handing medication out on the block. He made his way over to one detainee on the block and instructed him to drink a can of Ensure [a lot of detainees were given this as they were underweight and malnourished]. The detainee refused to take the Ensure. The medic told him multiple times to take it and the detainee still refused. The medic then went and told the block NCOIC of the situation. The block NCOIC then went to the detainee and gave him the same instructions to take the can of Ensure. Once again the detainee refused to follow orders.

Next, the on-duty OIC [Officer in Charge] was notified of the situation. The OIC then made his way to the block where a discussion went on about the situation and the conclusion was that the detainee could not refuse any medications at all. The camp OIC then went over to the detainee and gave him the same instruction to drink the Ensure or, if he refused, he would be forced to take it. Once again he refused to drink it. The call was made on the radio for the IRF team. The IRF team entered the block where they were met by the OIC and the medic. They were told of the situation and advised once they entered the cell they were to restrain the detainee so the medic could give him the can of Ensure. The IRF team then started to approach the cage the detainee was in. Since I was on the block, I walked on the other side of the cage so I could watch what was going on. Once the IRF team was lined up and got in position to enter the cell the OIC unlocked the lock and pulled it off and opened the cage door. The detainee just stood there, facing the IRF team. BOOM! The No 1 Man hit the detainee with the shield causing him to fall to the cement floor of the cage. Quickly, the whole team was on top of the detainee. They stood him up and hand-cuffed him to the fence in the cage. The person who had the shield held the detainee’s head so he could not move. The medic then entered the cage with the can of Ensure. Once he entered the cage he looked up and saw me. He then motioned for me to move over to my left (his right). So I moved over. I did not think anything about it. He then opened the Ensure can, grabbed the detainee by the neck, and started to pour it down his throat. The detainee was attempting to move his head, and he wouldn’t swallow any of it. The Ensure just ran down his face all over him.

The medic looked up one quick time and punched the detainee twice on the left side of his face with his right fist. The medic then just turned around and walked out of the cage like nothing happened. The detainee was then un-handcuffed from the cage and laid down on the cement in the cage. He was then hog-tied. He laid in this position for a couple hours.

When the whole incident was over, I turned around and noticed the guard tower where the Marines were stationed watching over and realised that the medic had placed me in front of the view of the tower and I had not realised it.

I later learnt through other detainees on the block the reason the man refused the Ensure was that he thought he was being poisoned.

That was a ghastly incident?

One day, while on duty at Camp X-Ray, I was assigned to escorting duties. I was at the very back of the camp. There was like a big shed there. This was also where the IRF team was stationed at until called upon. On this day the call came for the IRF team to come to Bravo Block. They made their way to the block and, at the time, I was not doing anything, so I made my way down to the block to watch from the outside. The situation on the block was that a detainee had called a female MP “bitch” a couple times. For punishment, the IRF team was called upon to enter the cage and hog-tie the detainee. The female MP was very upset, yelling: “Whip his ass!”

The IRF team, along with the camp OIC, approached the detainee’s cage and told him to stop yelling and lay down so he could be restrained. The detainee just stood there, staring at them. The IRF team lined up in position to enter the cage. The OIC unlocked the lock on the cage door and, when this was done, the detainee turned around, went to his knees and placed his hands on the top of his head. The lock was taken off and the cage door was opened. The No 1 Man on the IRF team tossed his shield to the side and, with a quick run towards the detainee, hopped in the air and came down on the back of the detainee with his knee. This caused the detainee to fall to the cement floor of the cage with the No 1 Man on top of him. Then the whole IRF team was on top of him, hitting, punching and kicking him. It seemed like a long time, but in reality it lasted 15-20 seconds.

While the IRF team was still on top of the detainee, someone yelled for the female MP that was called a bitch. She entered the cage and she punched the detainee a couple times in the head and then left the cage. The detainee laid there cuffed-up but motionless and unresponsive. Next thing I saw were medics coming from the medical house with a stretcher. They left the block with the detainee on the stretcher; they took him to a waiting military ambulance and he was transported to the main hospital. I went back to work not fully knowing what was wrong or what happened to the detainee.

Anything you want to add about IRFings?

I don’t believe the IRF team was used for the right reasons at all. At least the people on the team used it for the wrong reasons. It was their way to beat up on someone who was smaller and weaker than them. I have often wondered why you would need five healthy, grown men, in riot gear, to go take a down a detainee who was most likely underweight and very weak.

You say the Koran was thrown to the floor. That suggests it was done intentionally?

When the incident happened with the Koran, I was on Alpha Block working that day. All of a sudden detainees started to yell and chant, and it spread around the camp in a second. Next thing I know, detainees were throwing their mats out of the cages. Some were throwing their water out of their bucket out of the cage. Everyone was going off. Then we heard that on Charlie Block, during cell search, a guard had thrown the Koran to the ground, and that was the cause of this.

Well, the guard that threw the Koran to the ground was a really good friend of mine. I talked to him that night about what happened. He swears he didn’t throw the Koran to the ground being hateful. He told me he was just doing a cell search – as was to be done every time a detainee left the cage. We were told to search the Korans, and that’s what he did. And he said that, before thinking about it, he tossed it to the side, hitting the ground. And that’s when all hell broke loose in the camp. He was very upset about the whole thing. He was really worried something would happen to him as far as disciplinary [action] through the chain of command, mainly due to the fact the Colonel had stated he wanted that soldier who was responsible for this to be punished. But he never was and, after a while, it was all forgotten about.

You say that pork was given to a detainee, without warning him and knowing that this violated religious rules?

There was loud rock music that was played throughout the camp, especially in the early days of X-Ray. Over time this seemed to stop, but the National Anthem was played every morning at 0630 hours. Muslim calls to prayer were broadcast after the first week of Camp X-Ray. During call to prayer, many times soldiers would mock and laugh at the detainees. Many would also try to sing along to the call for prayer, trying to be funny. I also know that sometimes, during call for prayer, water would be given out to the detainees in their bucket, and some would spray the detainees with water during prayer, then stating it was an accident.

I remember just talking to some detainees and them telling me that, since they had nothing else to do, they were studying their religion more and reading the Koran to better understand their religion. I remember thinking I couldn’t believe how dedicated these people were to their religion; always reading the Koran, always praying. I actually admired them for this, as you don’t see a lot of people take religion so seriously.

You got detainees to volunteer to empty the waste buckets?

The waste buckets were to be emptied at the end of every shift – so around every eight hours. Us guards would empty the buckets, but eventually we started to refuse to do so, due to health reasons, and it was just plain nasty. A whole bucket full of human waste we would pick up just wearing gloves and carry to a port potty and empty. Eventually detainees were bribed with candy from the MREs [ready-to-eat meals] to empty them, and many of them did this, many stating they did so just to get out of their cage and move around.

Were there any old-timers or children in Guantanamo during your tour? Were they afforded any special treatment on account of their age?

I did see a couple older people, probably in late fifties or sixties. They were not given any special treatment at all. They were treated just like the rest of the detainees. As for children, I never saw any, but there was talk that some had come to Guantanamo during our time there, and that they were being kept at the Navy Brig on the base, where it was all isolation cells. There was a lot of talk about that. No one actually ever said there were children being held there. There was just a lot of talk from the people who worked at the Brig that some of the detainees looked really young?

Were detainees verbally abused?

Upon arrival, detainees were screamed at throughout the whole process. They were told to shut up, walk faster, and whatnot. Some guards would call them “sand niggers”. I never heard that phrase until I was at Guantanamo. Detainees would be told that their country had been nuked and nothing was left, and that their families were dead. I know of some guards even telling detainees they could be executed at any time. This all was being said on the blocks by fellow MPs.

You said that you talked plenty of times with the Australian prisoner David Hicks. What did you two talk about?

I remember David Hicks very clearly as, to me, he is one of the two most memorable detainees I came across. Due to him being able to communicate so clearly with us. And because he just reminded me of a guy I would have just gone out and have a beer with.

Over time, I would talk to him a couple times while at Camp X-Ray. He would talk about how he was from Australia. He would say sometimes how he couldn’t wait to receive news from back home from his parents. I can remember him mentioning a couple times that he was divorced and I believe he had one or two kids.

Even to me, he never denied being in Afghanistan, but he would make it a point to emphasise that he was not fighting the Americans, and said on many occasions he would not fight the Americans. He said he was there fighting in the country before the United States started to attack. He then went on to say he was attempting to leave Afghanistan when, one night, he was on board a taxi and the taxi was stopped by the Northern Alliance. He was captured from there. He then stated that the Northern Alliance didn’t treat him too badly and that, the next thing he knew, he was told he was being sold to the Americans for $1,500.

Hicks did not come across as the cold-blooded killer that we were told all these guys were. He was a normal guy like me. And not much older. He would sit there, crack a joke, and make small talk. Just like any other normal person would. During these times is when I really started to look at the detainees as real people and not just monsters, as I had been told they were. This man had a family and people that loved him, as I had. And we both missed them greatly and we both wanted to return to our families as soon as we could.

You say you talked a lot about music with the British detainee Ruhal Ahmed?

I think being around the same age as him – and since I listened to a lot of music – we could connect on that level. We also talked about normal stuff guys our age did. Everything from girls, to what we did when we went out on the town.

Many times, while working Alpha Block, if I didn’t understand someone, or wanted to know what was going on, I would ask Ruhal for help. I was actually older than he was by a year. And I was only 21 at the time. I could not imagine, at that age, suffering what he went through. The Ruhal Ahmed I saw and spoke with was just a normal, everyday young guy like I was. If I had seen him walking down the street or at a bar I would not think twice, and I definitely would not have thought he was a terrorist.

I know that being in the position I was in, as an active duty Military Police officer guarding the most dangerous men in the world, that I was not supposed to really interact with the detainees. But it’s hard. Especially when you realise that some of these guys are no different than yourself. The military trains you not to think and just to react and not feel any compassion for anyone or anybody. And do what you are told. No questions asked.

Did you witness any acts of kindness there, either by the guards or the prisoners?

Just because many of us were guards at Guantanamo does not make us automatically bad people. I know for a fact, one or two people, including myself, felt sorry for these people – and very ashamed of what we were taking part in. But what could we say? If we questioned anything or talked out against what we thought was wrong, we would have been ridiculed. And who knows what else we would have had to face? So we kept our mouths shut and went to work every day, counting down the days until we could return home to our families and just could forget about this time we spent in Guantanamo.

Although you have already begun to do so, can you tell me how you came to think the way you do about Guantanamo? How did your views change?

When I initially learnt of my deployment to Guantanamo and the purpose we were going for, I was ready to go and face the world’s most dangerous men; these terrorists who had plotted and killed thousands of people in my country on 11 September 2001. I was ready to seek my own personal revenge on these people in whatever manner I could.

Then the day came when these “world’s most dangerous men” arrived, and they were not what I expected to see. Most of them were small, underweight, very scared, and injured. I was expecting these people to come off that bus looking like vicious monsters. Then, I was one of the people responsible for the older detainee being injured. And seeing the abuse these detainees went through? The same people I worked with every day, the same people I went to sleep with every night, were the same people mistreating these detainees. After speaking with the detainees and realising they had families who loved them, just as I had, I started to realise that these people are no different than me. Hell! I was older than some of the ones there.

I also grew to respect the Muslim culture during my time at Guantanamo. I greatly admired the detainees for praying all the time and being true to their religion. You don’t see that in America much any more.

I think everyone can agree that, at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, there are some really bad people. And there are a lot of good people there as well. But – innocent, guilty, black, white, Muslim, or Jew, no matter what you are – there is no excuse to treat people in the manner that I and other people did. It’s wrong and just downright criminal, and it goes against everything the United States of America stands for.

Brandon Neely gave this interview as part of the Guantanamo Testimonials Project, run by the Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas at the University of California. To read the full transcript, or to contact the organisation or donate funds, visit humanrights.ucdavis.edu

Mohawk Nation News update

2009-02-20T03:09:00.001-05:00

Global Nuclear Genocide of Indigenous - government liquidation strategy? It won't work!

MNN. Feb. 19, 2009. A sickening picture is shaping up. The evidence continues to mount like a smelly compost heap, except it has no organic value and it’s a serious threat to the generations to come. Who doesn’t know that radiation is deadly? Government and the nuclear industry keep lying to us! They deny the grisly effects such as cancer, birth defects and many environmental illnesses caused by radioactive toxins in our air, land and water.

The nuclear industry seized on the “peak oil” and “global warming” crisis which they created and turned it to their advantage. They call nuclear a “green”, “clean”, “renewable” resource because they can reuse the deadly waste to make nuclear weapons. They lump it under with wind and solar. The theme of the Canadian Nuclear Association CNA convention and trade show from February 25 to 27 at the Westin in Ottawa is “the reality of renaissance”. [Is that crazy or what?] Yes, they rely on our ignorance and naivety. Their philosophy is, “There’s a sucker born every minute” and let’s melt them down!

These transnational corporate psychopaths are anti-life. They want to build dozens of nuclear reactors all over the world in Indigenous communities along and dump the nuclear waste for us to “manage”!! We live in remote areas far from any place they would want to even visit. If the radiation doesn’t kill us, they can make nuclear weapons to finish us off. We are in the way for their attempted reckless pillage and plunder of Mother Earth.

These multinational thugs are fomenting war in the volatile tribal areas between India and Pakistan. Both countries are already armed with nuclear weapons. To make money and depopulate Asia both sides are being armed by the same interests. Canada is one.

India doesn’t produce uranium. They lease it from Russia. The highly radioactive and toxic spent fuel is sent back to Russia. If Canada sells more CANDU reactors to India, they want to supply the uranium fuel and then bring back the nuclear waste to make nuclear weapons. (See endnotes for profiteers).

Meanwhile, Canada helps set up private organizations as government fronts like CNA (Canadian Nuclear Association), NWMO (Nuclear Waste Management Organization) and CAP (Congress of Aboriginal People) and OMAA (Ontario Metis and Aboriginal Association). The latter two are so-called “aboriginal” organizations. NWMO and CNA are funding the Assembly of First Nations, another government set up, and CAP to talk us into managing and storing nuclear fuel waste on our territories. Meetings have gone on for years to get Elders and “leaders” on side. Canada has even sent in Mother Joan Holmes to turn non-natives into “Indians” who can then sign away our inherent rights. Nuclear salesmen are courting “Aboriginal partners” to sign away our birthright and existence.

So-called 34-year old “aboriginal”, Patrick “Fabio-Wannabe” Brazeau, was recently appointed Senator by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen “Ford-Modelling-Agent” Harper. What was this all about? Brazeau’s rap sheet looks like the antithesis of anything anyone would want in the Senate. He was rewarded for fronting the phony CAP to try to destroy Indigenous nations and sovereignty.

CAP has arrangements with NRC (Natural Resources Canada) and NWMO to consider nuclear waste management on or near our communities. Brazeau proposed, “... the 633 native communities in Canada be reduced to between 60 and 80. The 10 Algonquin reserves in Quebec and Ontario, for example, would become one. Same for the Cree. The Mohawk. And so on”. The guy didn’t consult any of us or visit any of our communities. Now, if he has any sense, he’d be afraid to come. He wants to redirect the flow of nearly $10 billion in federal funding for “aboriginal” programs and services in Canada. He thinks we wont need it because we are going to liquidated. So he wants the money to go to the many “aboriginal” that he and Mother Jones have created.

NWMO wants to store nuclear waste in Indigenous communities in the Canadian Shield. Sites in NAN (Nishnaabe Aski Nation) in northern Ontario appear to be the most likely. Ben Cheechoo and other Indigenous started out defying the government and defending our people, culture and sovereignty. They were gradually worn down to accept this senseless destructive agenda that threatens all of the future generations on the whole earth. The FSC (Forestry Stewardship Council of Germany) was instrumental in Cheechoo’s conversion through agents like Russell Diabo and David Nahwehgabow. FSC is a private UN backed organization that is designed to issue permits allowing multinational companies to cut down old growth forests on Indigenous lands worldwide. It’s completely illegal!

A telling example of these “courtships” with the Indigenous is the recent attempted seduction of the Navaho. Areva, the French nuclear power company, took the council on a recent trip to Paris. Areva “owns” uranium mines in northern Saskatchewan. They want the Navaho to put a nuclear reactor and to do more uranium mining in their territory in the U.S. southwest.

The Navaho know about the devastation of uranium tailings. Most want nothing to do with nuclear development. The same is true of the Ojibwe, Cree and Metis who have been targeted in northern Canada. Nishnaabe are fully aware of and suffering from the ongoing poisoning at Blind River and the tons of nuclear waste at Elliot Lake.

Nuclear promoters like AECL (Atomic Energy Canada Ltd) and CNSC (Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission) will coo soothingly, in their brushed suits, carefully coiffed hair [if they have any] and manicured hands, “There’s no risk”. (See endnotes) They lie while people are slowly dying horrible deaths in communities like Chalk River and Port Hope near nuclear facilities.

How do we stop this madness? We all need the facts about these dirty deals and sinister schemes. We have to closely watch and loudly object to those people the government sets up to “represent” us.

We all have to drastically cut back on our materialistic lifestyle. Every household could be generating enough clean energy to power their own grid. We Indigenous understand this basic and practical way of taking only what we need and leaving little or no footprint.

The elders are concerned about the future based on our traditional knowledge. The youth are concerned with living with the legacy of nuclear waste disposal. Women are concerned with protecting the clean and safe water for all people and the environment as this is our traditional role. [See notes and links below].

Iakoha’ko:wa & MNN Staff Mohawk Nation News www.mohawknationnews.com kittoh@storm.ca katenies20@yahoo.com kahentinetha2@yahoo.com Note: Your financial help is needed and appreciated. Please send your donations to PayPal at www.mohawknationnews.com, or by check or money order to “MNN Mohawk Nation News”, Box 991, Kahnawake [Quebec, Canada] J0L 1B0. Nia:wen thank you very much. Go to MNN “Canada” category for more stories; New MNN Books Available now! Purchase t-shirts, mugs and more at our CafePressStore http://www.cafepress.com/mohawknews; Subscribe to MNN for breaking news updates http://.mohawknationnews.com/news/subscription.php; Sign Women Title Holders petition! http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/Iroquois

Notes, Sources and Contacts
In “Eaglefeather News” of Saskatchewan www.brucepower.com. Very misleading article. With all the sun, wind and low population, why would anyone want a nuclear reactor there?

Re CNSC and AECL: MNN spoke with Marc Drolet. Why is it the leaking NRU reactor still going? Marc passed the buck to AECL. CNSC told Parliamentarians on Feb 5 that there was no risk. He called it "concentration". The levels permitted in Canada is 100 times that allowed in Europe. He disagreed. We emailed him the link for Ace Hoffman's book. Later he email: "I suggest you formulate more precise questions to receive comments from our scientists. You mention tritium; and its long-term impact on infants and export-control issues related to some states that may want to use nuclear technology to less than peaceful ends. He said, “Our experts provide answers in plain English”. Marc Drolet, Public Affairs and Media Relations, Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, Ottawa, Canada K1P 5S9, 613-947-0442, Blackberry 613-808-3134, Fax 613-992-2915

Sean Cotnam of AECL said: the reactor was running today and had been shut down last week for regular maintenance. When would it be shut down permanently? "It won't be shut down for a long time, ma'am". He said the information from the Uof Toronto professor saying that Canada's tritium level is 100 times that of Europe was incorrect. He said it is only 70 times that of Europe and 10 times that of the US!!! He is completely safe living on the Ottawa River and was not worried about his young children.

India and Pakistan each have about 30 nuclear warheads and have reached the brink of nuclear war before. India is buying plenty of military hardware. Pakistan is the #1 top recipient of US military aid in the world, receiving about $3.6 billion [New American Century] since 2006. They also receive aid from the World Bank to build dams and other infrastructure.
<http://www.newamerica.net/publications/policy/u_s_weapons_war_2008_0>
US Predator UAV's armed with Hellfire missiles have killed dozens of people in cross border forays into Pakistan from Afghanistan.

Profiteers in the global nuclear industry include: WorleyParsons Canada Ltd. Nuclear Energy, (905) 940-4770 8133 Warden Avenue, Markham, ON L8G 1B3 http://www.worleyparsons.com/GlobalPresence/Pages/default.aspx
Offices worldwide, including 4 in China and one in Canada. 28,000 employees in engineering and construction. Biggest in China. Ready to build "nuclear parks" deep in the mire of Athabasca oil sands. Their profits are up 50% over last year. OTHER SUCKS: Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL),Organization of CANDU Industries, CAMECO Corporation, SNC Lavalin Nuclear, Bechtel, Canada China Power Inc., Areva of France, Ontario Power Generation, Bruce Power, Power Workers Union, GE-Hitachi, Hitachi, Comstock, Fox Constructors, Wardrop, The Society, AMEC, L-3Com, RCM Technologies, B&W, Black & McDonald, Power Train, Nuvia, NWMO, Hydro-Quebec, HSL, Aecon, Amidyne, CUSW, Industrial AUdit, McMaster University, UOIT (University of Ontario Industry Technology), IML, BPR, SWI.
* Canadian Nuclear Association Conference and Trade Show, February 25 -27, Westin Hotel, Ottawa.
http://www.cna.ca/english/index.asp Canadian Nuclear Association, 130 Albert Street, Suite 1610 Ottawa, Ontario K1P 5G4, 613-237-4262 Fax: 613-237-0989
Contacts: http://www.nrcan-rncan.gc.ca/com/concon/concon-eng.php
Lisa Raitt, NR Min; MP Halton, (613) 996-2007 MINO/MINO Lisa.Raitt@NRCan-RNCan.gc.ca
(613) 996-7046 Fax: (613) 992-0851 EMail: Raitt.L@parl.gc.ca DM Deputy Minister Doyle, Cassie J. since June, 2006; (613) 992-3280 DMO/DMO CassieJ.Doyle@NRCan-RNCan.gc.ca [also on board of directors at AECL]
Serge Dupont, Associate Deputy Minister, Natural Resources Canada (613) 996-9753 DMO/DMO Serge.Dupont@NRCan-RNCan.gc.ca
Min. Health Leona Aglukkaq Conservative Constituency: Nunavut, Telephone: (613) 992-2848 Fax: (613) 996-9764, Aglukkaq.L@parl.gc.ca www.leonaaglukkaq.ca/EN/5215/
HEALTH [WHAT A CONTRADICTION]! Morris Rosenberg, Deputy Minister Health since December 2004. Deputy Minister Justice and Deputy Attorney General of Canada from July 1998 to December 2004. 1993 to 1996 Assistant Secretary to the Cabinet, Economic and Regional Development Policy, Privy Council Office. Deputy Minister's Office - Health Canada, Brooke Claxton Building, Tunney's Pasture, Postal Locator: 0906C, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada > K1A 0K9 Fax: (613) 952-1154 dm_sm@hc-sc.gc.ca
CRITICS OF AECL: Geoff Regan ReganG@parl.gc.ca, (613) 996-3085 Fax: (613) 996-6988,
John Gerretsen MPP Minister of the Environment <jgerretsen.mpp.co@liberal.ola.org>,
George Smitherman MPP Energy & Infr. <gsmitherman.mpp.co@liberal.ola.org>
CNSC Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, CNSC Chalk River Laboratories Site, Building 432 Chalk River, ON K0J 1J0, Telephone: 613-584-7743 Fax: 613-584-9077, interventions@cnsc-ccsn.gc.ca; EA@cnsc-ccsn.gc.ca Marc Drolet, Public relations, 613 947-0442 <info@cnsc-ccsn.bc.ca>
AECL Chalk River Laboratories, Chalk River, Ontario Canada K0J 1J0, Phone: (613) 584-3311, Bill Pilkington, VP, talks to media Ext.#44429 (Sarah), Hugh MacDiarmid, Pres & CEO, Ext.#37330 (Helene)
Glenna Carr, Chair Board of Directors Ext.#37506 (Kimberly), Sean Cotnam, Public relations direct line: 613 584-8291
http://www.aecl.ca/Contact/Make_a_request_for_information.htm
http://www.aecl.ca/site3.aspx Public Requests for Information Toll free: 1-866-513-AECL (2325)
Media Enquiries Toll free: 1-866-886-2325 Community Enquiries Toll free: 1-800-364-6989
Some Canadian politicians including senators: NOTE: No email or photo is available for "Senator Brazeau". 613-947-4231 Fax: 613-947-4228, He is current Member of the following Senate committee(s): Aboriginal Peoples, Human Rights.

http://www.nan.on.ca/article/nan-staff-163.asp
NAN. sbeardy@nan.on.ca, twaboose@nan.on.ca, roseanne@nan.on.ca, afiddler@nan.on.ca, dfletcher@nan.on.ca, dkiecman@nan.on.ca, jshewaybick@nan.on.ca, fmckenzie@nan.on.ca, bnothing@nan.on.ca, gsmith@nan.on.ca, jhunter@nan.on.ca, acrozier@nan.on.ca, mheintzman@nan.on.ca, jnelson@nan.on.ca, ibeardy@nan.on.ca, pdesmoul@nan.on.ca, jforneri@nan.on.ca, pfayrick@nan.on.ca, jthompson@nan.on.ca, eachneep@nan.on.ca, nan@nan.on.ca, caudet@nan.on.ca, twilson@nan.on.ca, rmetlin@nan.on.ca, bmaloney@nan.on.ca, mgoodchild@nan.on.ca, wcaruk@nan.on.ca, lwabasse@nan.on.ca, sperrault@nan.on.ca, sbarkman@nan.on.ca, sbrown@nan.on.ca, cfox@nan.on.ca, cmackay@nan.on.ca, sachneep@nan.on.ca, bmainville@nan.on.ca, klcheechoo@nan.on.ca, amurphy@nan.on.ca, wtrylins@nan.on.ca, jcheechoo@nan.on.ca, gmedicin@nan.on.ca, kadcock@nan.on.ca, lbaxter@nan.on.ca, dsimon@nan.on.ca, csimard@nan.on.ca, ehanson@nan.on.ca, jalto@nan.on.ca, bwheesk@nan.on.ca, rmamakwa@nan.on.ca, dfrenett@nan.on.ca, blouttit@nan.on.ca, lhunter@nan.on.ca, jwheesk@nan.on.ca, bencheechoo@nan.on.ca, msault@nan.on.ca, ljeffries@nan.on.ca, staylor@nan.on.ca, lbiggeorge@nan.on.ca,

OTTAWA DOUCHE BAGS: Reid.S@parl.gc.ca, Harper.S@parl.gc.ca, Nicholson.R@parl.gc.ca, Aglukkaq.L@parl.gc.ca, Day.S@parl.gc.ca,VanLoan.P@parl.gc.ca, McCallum.J@parl.gc.ca, ReganG@parl.gc.ca, Raitt.L@parl.gc.ca, Easter.W@parl.gc.ca, Szabo.P@parl.gc.ca, Baird.J@parl.gc.ca, Clement.T@parl.gc.ca, leader@greenparty.ca, donna.dillman@greenparty.ca, Cannon.L@parl.gc.ca, Sorenson.K@parl.gc.ca, Dewar.P@parl.gc.ca, FAAE@parl.gc.ca, Patry.B@parl.gc.ca, ThibaLo@parl.gc.ca, ChongM@parl.gc.ca, TrostB@parl.gc.ca, BigraB@parl.gc.ca, CardiS@parl.gc.ca, LafraM@parl.gc.ca, CulleN@parl.gc.ca, GallaC@parl.gc.ca, HawnL@parl.gc.ca, McTeaD@parl.gc.ca, AlghaO@parl.gc.ca, AnderDa@parl.gc.ca, BevinD@parl.gc.ca, DebelC@parl.gc.ca, OuellCh@parl.gc.ca, CrowdJ@parl.gc.ca, ChowO@parl.gc.ca, LunnG@parl.gc.ca, BerniM@parl.gc.ca, StrahC@parl.gc.ca, MilliP@parl.gc.ca, Hill.J@parl.gc.ca, MacKay.P@parl.gc.ca, Kramp.D@parl.gc.ca, Brown.G@parl.gc.ca, DelMastro.D@parl.gc.ca, Dewar.P@parl.gc.ca, Coderre.D@parl.gc.ca, DionS@parl.gc.ca, Comartin.J@parl.gc.ca, Oda.B@parl.gc.ca, OConnor.G@parl.gc.ca, Atamaa1@parl.gc.ca, blackd@parl.gc.ca,Black.D@parl.gc.ca, Ambrose.R@parl.gc.ca, Toews.V@parl.gc.ca, Blackburn.J@parl.gc.ca, Paradis.C@parl.gc.ca, Moore.J@parl.gc.ca, Mulcair.T@parl.gc.ca, Duceppe.G@parl.gc.ca, Barbot.V@parl.gc.ca, Layton.J@parl.gc.ca, BlackJ@parl.gc.ca,

dmcquinty.mpp@liberal.ola.org, john.bennett@greenparty.ca, randy@ruralrevolution.com, info@randyhillier.com, holland.m@parl.gc.ca, pm@pm.gc.ca, ottawa@chuckstrahl.com, john.yakabuskico@pc.ola.org, jim.wilsonco@pc.ola.org, tim.hudakco@pc.ola.org, hhampton-qp@ndp.on.ca, pkormos-qp@ndp.on.ca, gphillips.mpp@liberal.ola.org, dramsay.mpp@liberal.ola.org, gilles@gillesbisson.com, mbryant.mpp@liberal.ola.org, leader@greenparty.ca, info@greenparty.ca, rlm@xplornet.com, lorraine.rekmans@greenparty.ca, jwarnock@ontarioeast.net, doherty@kos.net, hhampton-qp@ndp.on.ca, norm.sterlingco@pc.ola.org, president@lisamacleod.ca, ahorwath-qp@ndp.on.ca, joyce.savoline@pc.ola.org, dzimmer.mpp@liberal.ola.org, tabunsp-qp@ndp.on.ca, laurie.scott@pc.ola.org, robert.runcimanco@pc.ola.org, brad.duguid@liberal.ola.org, rbartolucci.mpp.co@liberal.ola.org, toby.barrett@pc.ola.org, donna.cansfield@liberal.ola.org, michael.gravelle@liberal.ola.org, dave.levac@liberal.ola.org, garfield.dunlop@pc.ola.org, gilles.bisson@ndp.ola.org, jeff.leal@liberal.ola.org, brad.duguid@liberal.ola.org; norm.miller@pc.ola.org; peter.kormos@ndp.ola.org; Prentice.J@parl.gc.ca, brianmitchell@conservative.ca, brucemclaughlin@conservative.ca, ceciltaylor@conservative.ca, DonPlett@conservative.ca, gilleslavoie@conservative.ca, gordelliott@conservative.ca, jeanleblanc@conservative.ca, karajohnson@conservative.ca, liamobrien@conservative.ca, loisbrown@conservative.ca, mennofroese@conservative.ca, michaelmacdonald@conservative.ca, rayleitch@conservative.ca, richardciano@conservative.ca, sammagnus@conservative.ca, stephanedesilets@conservative.ca, susanmcarthur@conservative.ca, victormarciano@conservative.ca, ericw@kingstongreens.ca, morganw@kingstongreens.ca, Julian.P@parl.gc.ca, GreenLight1@kingstongreens.ca, andrer@sen.parl.gc.ca, bakerg@sen.parl.gc.ca, carsts@sen.parl.gc.ca, rattel@sen.parl.gc.ca, cochre@sen.parl.gc.ca, zimmer@sen.parl.gc.ca, tkachd@sen.parl.gc.ca, smithd@sen.parl.gc.ca, kfl@sen.parl.gc.ca, poulim@sen.parl.gc.ca, lachah@sen.parl.gc.ca, munsoj@sen.parl.gc.ca, mahovf@sen.parl.gc.ca; CassieJ.Doyle@NRCan-RNCan.gc.ca; Lisa.Raitt@NRCan-RNCan.gc.ca; Serge.Dupont@NRCan-RNCan.gc.ca; Raitt.L@parl.gc.ca; Aglukkaq.L@parl.gc.ca; dm_sm@hc-sc.gc.ca

2009-02-20T03:06:00.000-05:00

"Afghanistan needs troops--but it needs troops of doctors, troops of teachers, troops of Peace Corps volunteers, and troops of farmers to go and replant the fruit orchards."
--Kavita Ramdas, President and CEO of Global Fund for Women

Dear Virginia,

We danced the "Yes We Can-Can" on Inauguration day as we applauded President Obama's promises to take our nation in a new direction. With his recent announcement of an additional 17,000 troops to be deployed to Afghanistan, we see change come to a screeching halt and a dangerous continuation of the same failed US policies of the Bush era blaze forward. Just as in Iraq, misplaced hope in military solutions is pushing peaceful strategies to the back seat. Take action and help President Obama do the right thing- we need an escalation in peaceful alternatives, not military force!

Call 202-456-1111 today! Tell the Administration that we want:

1) Reduction of troop levels in Afghanistan
2) Rapid withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan and Iraq
3) A commitment to diplomacy involving all major regional players, including major international peace-keeping bodies
4) Addressing the real needs of Afghans by funding development assistance for Afghanistan's basic human needs - health-care, clean water, education, security, rights for women and girls-, through Afghan NGOs, using local labor and services

Take a tip from Senator Feingold and ask the tough questions: "We need to ask: After seven years of war, will more troops help us achieve our strategic goals in Afghanistan? Is there a danger that a heavier military footprint will further alienate the population, and, if so, what are the alternatives?" Even Obama's advisors say the war in Afghanistan "cannot be won on the battlefield." Over 2/3 of Americans oppose the deployments, and a majority of Europeans want their troops home- leaders of Spain, France and Germany have refused to send any additional forces!

It is said that the definition of insanity is to repeat the same action but to expect a different result. President Obama is a deeply intelligent man, but it is crazy for him to stay on Bush's crash course of empire building, and all the devastation and loss of life it leaves in its wake. We can help Obama find the road to peace and make sure he keeps his promises!

Yes we can end war,
Audrey, Dana, Deidra, Desiree, Farida, Gael, Gayle, Jean, Jodie, Liz, Lori, Medea, Nancy, Paris, and Rae

P.S. When you are connected to your Representative's office, keep your message short and to the point. Tell them:

More troops only means more violence, more suffering, more killing of innocents, and more recruits for the Taliban. Instead of a surge, President Obama must take bold and compassionate action to address the Afghan's real need for health care, clean water and education, instead of continuing to cripple Afghanistan with more years of war. Call on Obama to fulfill his promise for peace and change! Call (202)456-1111 TODAY!
Click here for more resources

Glenn Greenwold war crimes update

2009-02-20T03:05:00.000-05:00

Greenwald: U.S. Is Bound By Treaty to Prosecute Torture Crimes

Posted: 18 Feb 2009 07:00 PM PST

Glenn Greenwald on why we're bound by law to prosecute torture cases. (Incidentally, he also points out that a new report states that Bush officials were informed that the legal memos submitted to justify torture were slanted to fit administration policy):

The U.S. really has bound itself to a treaty called the Convention Against Torture, signed by Ronald Reagan in 1988 and ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1994. When there are credible allegations that government officials have participated or been complicit in torture, that Convention really does compel all signatories -- in language as clear as can be devised -- to "submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution" (Art. 7(1)). And the treaty explicitly bars the standard excuses that America's political class is currently offering for refusing to investigate and prosecute: "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture" and "an order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture" (Art. 2 (2-3)). By definition, then, the far less compelling excuses cited by Conason (a criminal probe would undermine bipartisanship and distract us from more important matters) are plainly barred as grounds for evading the Convention's obligations.

There is reasonable dispute about the scope of prosecutorial discretion permitted by the Convention, and there is also some lack of clarity about how many of these provisions were incorporated into domestic law when the Senate ratified the Convention with reservations. But what is absolutely clear beyond any doubt is that -- just as is true for any advance promises by the Obama DOJ not to investigate or prosecute -- issuing preemptive pardons to government torturers would be an unambiguous and blatant violation of our obligations under the Convention. There can't be any doubt about that. It just goes without saying that if the U.S. issued pardons or other forms of immunity to accused torturers (as the Military Commissions Act purported to do), that would be a clear violation of our obligation to "submit the [torture] case to [our] competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution." Those two acts -- the granting of immunity and submission for prosecution -- are opposites.

And yet those who advocate that we refrain from criminal investigations rarely even mention our obligations under the Convention. There isn't even a pretense of an effort to reconcile what they're advocating with the treaty obligations to which Ronald Reagan bound the U.S. in 1988. Do we now just explicitly consider ourselves immune from the treaties we signed? Does our political class now officially (rather than through its actions) consider treaties to be mere suggestions that we can violate at will without even pretending to have any justifications for doing so? Most of the time, our binding treaty obligations under the Convention -- as valid and binding as every other treaty -- don't even make it into the discussion about criminal investigations of Bush officials, let alone impose any limits on what we believe we can do.

Another Chalmers Johnson Classic: DoD procurement nightmare

2009-02-03T06:22:00.003-05:00

Tomgram: Chalmers Johnson, Economic Death Spiral at the Pentagon

Recently, reviewing lobbying disclosure reports, the Washington Times discovered "that 18 of the top 20 recipients of federal bailout money spent a combined $12.2 million lobbying the White House, the Treasury Department, Congress, and federal agencies during the last quarter of 2008." Citibank alone, according to the New York Times, fielded "an army of Washington lobbyists," plunking down $1.77 million in lobbying fees just in the fourth quarter of last year.

And it isn't only sinking financial institutions begging for federal dollars that have bolstered their Washington lobbying corps. So have the biggest U.S. armaments companies -- "drastically," according to reporter August Cole of the Wall Street Journal. In 2008, he found, Northrop Grumman almost doubled its lobbying budget to $20.6 million (from $10.9 million the previous year); Boeing upped its budget from $10.6 million to $16.6 million in the same period; and Lockheed-Martin, the company that received the most contracts from the Pentagon last year, hiked its lobbying efforts by a whopping 54% in 2008.

If you want to get a taste of what that means, then click here to view an ad for that company's potentially embattled boondoggle, the F-22, the most expensive jet fighter ever built. What you'll discover is not just that it will "protect" 300 million people -- that's you, if you live in the USA -- but that it will also employ 95,000 of us. In other words, the ad's threatening message implies, if the Obama administration cuts this program in bad times, it will throw another 95,000 Americans out on the street. Now that's effective lobbying for you, especially when you consider, as Chalmers Johnson does below, that for any imaginable war the U.S. might fight in the coming decades, the F-22 will be a thoroughly useless plane.

We don't usually think of the Pentagon as a jobs-and-careers scam operation, a kind of Mega-Madoff Ponzi scheme that goes BOOM!, though it is clearly designed for the well-being of defense contractors, military officers, and congressional representatives; nor do we usually consider the "defense" budget as a giant make-work jobs racket, as arms experts Bill Hartung and Christopher Preble recently suggested, but it's never too late.

Chalmers Johnson, author of the already-classic Blowback Trilogy, including most recently Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, makes vividly clear just how little the Pentagon is organized to consider the actual defense needs of the United States. In many ways, it remains a deadly organization of boys with toys that now poses a distinct economic danger to the rest of us. (Check out, as well, a TomDispatch audio interview with Johnson on the Pentagon's economic death spiral by clicking here). Tom

The Looming Crisis at the Pentagon
How Taxpayers Finance Fantasy Wars
By Chalmers Johnson
Like much of the rest of the world, Americans know that the U.S. automotive industry is in the grips of what may be a fatal decline. Unless it receives emergency financing and undergoes significant reform, it is undoubtedly headed for the graveyard in which many American industries are already buried, including those that made televisions and other consumer electronics, many types of scientific and medical equipment, machine tools, textiles, and much earth-moving equipment -- and that's to name only the most obvious candidates. They all lost their competitiveness to newly emerging economies that were able to outpace them in innovative design, price, quality, service, and fuel economy, among other things.

A similar, if far less well known, crisis exists when it comes to the military-industrial complex. That crisis has its roots in the corrupt and deceitful practices that have long characterized the high command of the Armed Forces, civilian executives of the armaments industries, and Congressional opportunists and criminals looking for pork-barrel projects, defense installations for their districts, or even bribes for votes.

Given our economic crisis, the estimated trillion dollars we spend each year on the military and its weaponry is simply unsustainable. Even if present fiscal constraints no longer existed, we would still have misspent too much of our tax revenues on too few, overly expensive, overly complex weapons systems that leave us ill-prepared to defend the country in a real military emergency. We face a double crisis at the Pentagon: we can no longer afford the pretense of being the Earth's sole superpower, and we cannot afford to perpetuate a system in which the military-industrial complex makes its fortune off inferior, poorly designed weapons.

Double Crisis at the Pentagon

This self-destructive system of bloated budgets and purchases of the wrong weapons has persisted for so long thanks to the aura of invincibility surrounding the Armed Forces and a mistaken belief that jobs in the arms industry are as valuable to the economy as jobs in the civilian sector.

Recently, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen began to advocate nothing less than protecting the Pentagon budget by pegging defense spending to a fixed percentage of gross domestic product (GDP, the total value of goods and services produced by the economy). This would, of course, mean simply throwing out serious strategic analysis of what is actually needed for national defense. Mullen wants, instead, to raise the annual defense budget in the worst of times to at least 4% of GDP. Such a policy is clearly designed to deceive the public about ludicrously wasteful spending on weapons systems which has gone on for decades.

It is hard to imagine any sector of the American economy more driven by ideology, delusion, and propaganda than the armed services. Many people believe that our military is the largest, best equipped, and most invincible among the world's armed forces. None of these things is true, but our military is, without a doubt, the most expensive to maintain. Each year, we Americans account for nearly half of all global military spending, an amount larger than the next 45 nations together spend on their militaries annually.

Equally striking, the military seems increasingly ill-adapted to the types of wars that Pentagon strategists agree the United States is most likely to fight in the future, and is, in fact, already fighting in Afghanistan -- insurgencies led by non-state actors. While the Department of Defense produces weaponry meant for such wars, it is also squandering staggering levels of defense appropriations on aircraft, ships, and futuristic weapons systems that fascinate generals and admirals, and are beloved by military contractors mainly because their complexity runs up their cost to astronomical levels.

That most of these will actually prove irrelevant to the world in which we live matters not a whit to their makers or purchasers. Thought of another way, the stressed out American taxpayer, already supporting two disastrous wars and the weapons systems that go with them, is also paying good money for weapons that are meant for fantasy wars, for wars that will only be fought in the battlescapes and war-gaming imaginations of Defense Department "planners."

The Air Force and the Army are still planning as if, in the reasonably near future, they were going to fight an old-fashioned war of attrition against the Soviet Union, which disappeared in 1991; while the Navy, with its eleven large aircraft-carrier battle groups, is, as William S. Lind has written, "still structured to fight the Imperial Japanese Navy." Lind, a prominent theorist of so-called fourth-generation warfare (insurgencies carried out by groups such as al-Qaeda), argues that "the Navy's aircraft-carrier battle groups have cruised on mindlessly for more than half a century, waiting for those Japanese carriers to turn up. They are still cruising today, into, if not beyond, irrelevance… Submarines are today's and tomorrow's capital ships; the ships that most directly determine control of blue waters."

In December 2008, Franklin "Chuck" Spinney, a former high-ranking civilian in the Pentagon's Office of Systems Analysis (set up in 1961 to make independent evaluations of Pentagon policy) and a charter member of the "Fighter Mafia" of the 1980s and 1990s, wrote, "As has been documented for at least twenty years, patterns of repetitive habitual behavior in the Pentagon have created a self-destructive decision-making process. This process has produced a death spiral."

As a result, concluded Spinney, inadequate amounts of wildly overpriced equipment are purchased, "new weapons [that] do not replace old ones on a one for one basis." There is also "continual pressure to reduce combat readiness," a "corrupt accounting system" that "makes it impossible to sort out the priorities," and a readiness to believe that old solutions will work for the current crisis.

Failed Reform Efforts

There's no great mystery about the causes of the deep dysfunction that has long characterized the Pentagon's weapons procurement system. In 2006, Thomas Christie, former head of Operational Test and Evaluation, the most senior official at the Department of Defense for testing weapons and a Pentagon veteran of half a century, detailed more than 35 years of efforts to reform the weapons acquisition system. These included the 1971 Fitzhugh (or Blue Ribbon) Commission, the 1977 Steadman Review, the 1981 Carlucci Acquisition Initiatives, the 1986 Packard Commission, the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act, the 1989 Defense Management Review, the 1990 "Streamlining Review" of the Defense Science Board, the 1993-1994 report of the Acquisition Streamlining Task Force and of the Defense Science Board, the late 1990s Total System Performance Responsibility initiative of the Air Force, and the Capabilities-Based Acquisition approach of the Missile Defense Agency of the first years of this century.

Christie concluded: "After all these years of repeated reform efforts, major defense programs are taking 20 to 30 years to deliver less capability than planned, very often at two to three times the costs and schedules planned." He also added the following observations:

"Launching into major developments without understanding key technical issues is the root cause of major cost and schedule problems… Costs, schedules, and technical risks are often grossly understated at the outset… There are more acquisition programs being pursued than DoD [the Department of Defense] can possibly afford in the long term…
"By the time these problems are acknowledged, the political penalties incurred in enforcing any major restructuring of a program, much less its cancellation, are too painful to bear. Unless someone is willing to stand up and point out that the emperor has no clothes, the U.S. military will continue to hemorrhage taxpayer dollars and critical years while acquiring equipment that falls short of meeting the needs of troops in the field."

The inevitable day of reckoning, long predicted by Pentagon critics, has, I believe, finally arrived. Our problems are those of a very rich country which has become accustomed over the years to defense budgets that are actually jobs programs and also a major source of pork for the use of politicians in their reelection campaigns.

Given the present major recession, whose depths remain unknown, the United States has better things to spend its money on than Nimitz-class aircraft carriers at a price of $6.2 billion each (the cost of the USS George H. W. Bush, launched in January 2009, our tenth such ship) or aircraft that can cruise at a speed of Mach 2 (1,352 miles per hour).

However, don't wait for the Pentagon to sort out such matters. If it has proven one thing over the last decades, it's that it is thoroughly incapable of reforming itself. According to Christie, "Over the past 20 or so years, the DoD and its components have deliberately and systematically decimated their in-house technical capabilities to the point where there is little, if any, competence or initiative left in the various organizations tasked with planning and executing its budget and acquisition programs."

Gunning for the Air Force

President Obama has almost certainly retained Robert M. Gates as Secretary of Defense in part to give himself some bipartisan cover as he tries to come to grips with the bloated defense budget. Gates is also sympathetic to the desire of a few reformers in the Pentagon to dump the Lockheed-Martin F-22 "Raptor" supersonic stealth fighter, a plane designed to meet the Soviet Union's last proposed, but never built, interceptor.

The Air Force's old guard and its allies in Congress are already fighting back aggressively. In June 2008, Gates fired Secretary of the Air Force Michael W. Wynne and Air Force Chief of Staff General T. Michael Moseley. Though he was undoubtedly responding to their fervent support for the F-22, his cover explanation was their visible failure to adequately supervise the accounting and control of nuclear weapons.

In 2006, the Air Force had managed to ship to Taiwan four high-tech nose cone fuses for Minutemen ICBM warheads instead of promised helicopter batteries, an error that went blissfully undetected until March 2008. Then, in August 2007, a B-52 bomber carrying six armed nuclear cruise missiles flew across much of the country from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. This was in direct violation of standing orders against such flights over the United States.

As Julian Barnes and Peter Spiegel of the Los Angeles Times noted in June 2008, "Tensions between the Air Force and Gates have been growing for months," mainly over Gates's frustration about the F-22 and his inability to get the Air Force to deploy more pilotless aircraft to the various war zones. They were certainly not improved when Wynne, a former senior vice president of General Dynamics, went out of his way to cross Gates, arguing publicly that "any president would be damn happy to have more F-22s around if we had to get into a fight with China." It catches something of the power of the military-industrial complex that, despite his clear desire on the subject, Gates has not yet found the nerve -- or the political backing -- to pull the plug on the F-22; nor has he even dared to bring up the subject of canceling its more expensive and technically complicated successor, the F-35 "Joint Strike Fighter."

More than 20 years ago, Chuck Spinney wrote a classic account of the now-routine bureaucratic scams practiced within the Pentagon to ensure that Congress will appropriate funds for dishonestly advertised and promoted weapons systems and then prevent their cancellation when the fraud comes to light. In a paper he entitled "Defense Power Games," of which his superiors deeply disapproved, Spinney outlined two crucial Pentagon gambits meant to lock in such weaponry: "front-loading" and "political engineering."

It should be understood at the outset that all actors involved, including the military officers in charge of projects, the members of Congress who use defense appropriations to buy votes within their districts, and the contractors who live off the ensuing lucrative contracts, utilize these two scams. It is also important to understand that neither front-loading nor political engineering is an innocent or morally neutral maneuver. They both involve criminal intent to turn on the spigot of taxpayer money and then to jam it so that it cannot be turned off. They are de rigueur practices of our military-industrial complex.

Front-loading is the practice of appropriating funds for a new weapons project based solely on assurances by its official sponsors about what it can do. This happens long before a prototype has been built or tested, and invariably involves the quoting of unrealistically low unit costs for a sizeable order. Assurances are always given that the system's technical requirements will be simple or have already been met. Low-balling future costs, an intrinsic aspect of front-loading, is an old Defense Department trick, a governmental version of bait-and-switch. (What is introduced as a great bargain regularly turns out to be a grossly expensive lemon.)

Political engineering is the strategy of awarding contracts in as many different Congressional districts as possible. By making voters and Congressional incumbents dependent on military money, the Pentagon's political engineers put pressure on them to continue supporting front-loaded programs even after their true costs become apparent.

Front-loading and political engineering generate several typical features in the weapons that the Pentagon then buys for its arsenal. These continually prove unnecessarily expensive, are prone to break down easily, and are often unworkably complex. They tend to come with inadequate supplies of spare parts and ammunition, since there is not enough money to buy the numbers that are needed. They also force the services to repair older weapons and keep them in service much longer than is normal or wise. (For example, the B-52 bomber, which went into service in 1955, is still on active duty.)

Even though extended training would seem to be a necessary corollary of the complexity of such weapons systems, the excessive cost actually leads to reductions in training time for pilots and others. In the long run, it is because of such expedients and short-term fixes that American casualties may increase and, sooner or later, battles or wars may be lost.

For example, Northrop-Grumman's much touted B-2 stealth bomber has proven to be almost totally worthless. It is too delicate to deploy to harsh climates without special hangars first being built to protect it at ridiculous expense; it cannot fulfill any combat missions that older designs were not fully adequate to perform; and -- at a total cost of $44.75 billion for only 21 bombers -- it wastes resources needed for real combat situations.

Instead, in military terms, the most unexpectedly successful post-Vietnam aircraft has been the Fairchild A-10, unflatteringly nicknamed the "Warthog." It is the only close-support aircraft ever developed by the U.S. Air Force. Its task is to loiter over battlefields and assist ground forces in disposing of obstinate or formidable targets, which is not something that fits comfortably with the Air Force's hot-shot self-image.

Some 715 A-10s were produced and they served with great effectiveness in the first Persian Gulf War. All 715 cumulatively cost less than three B-2 bombers. The A-10 is now out of production because the Air Force establishment favors extremely fast aircraft that fly in straight lines at high altitudes rather than aircraft that are useful in battle. In the Afghan war, the Air Force has regularly inflicted heavy casualties on innocent civilians at least in part because it tries to attack ground targets from the air with inappropriately high-performance equipment.

Using the F-22 to Fight the F-16

The military-industrial complex is today so confident of its skills in gaming the system that it does not hesitate to publicize how many workers in a particular district will lose their jobs if a particular project is cancelled. Threats are also made -- and put into effect -- to withhold political contributions from uncooperative congressional representatives.

As Spinney recalls, "In July 1989, when some members of Congress began to build a coalition aimed at canceling the B-2, Northrop Corporation, the B-2's prime contractor, retaliated by releasing data which had previously been classified showing that tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions in profits were at risk in 46 states and 383 congressional districts." The B-2 was not cancelled.

Southern California's biggest private employers are Boeing Corporation and Northrop-Grumman. They are said to employ more than 58,000 workers in well-paying jobs, a major political obstacle to rationalizing defense expenditures even as recession is making such steps all but unavoidable.

Both front-loading and political engineering are alive and well in 2009. They are, in fact, now at the center of fierce controversies surrounding the extreme age of the present fleet of Air Force fighter aircraft, most of which date from the 1980s. Meanwhile the costs of the two most likely successors to the workhorse F-16 -- the F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter -- have run up so high that the government cannot afford to purchase significant numbers of either or them.

The F-16 made its first flight in December 1976, and a total of 4,400 have been built. They have been sold, or given away, all over the world. Planning for the F-22 began in 1986, when the Cold War was still alive (even if on life support), and the Air Force was trumpeting its fears that the other superpower, the USSR, was planning a new, ultra-fast, highly maneuverable fighter.

By the time the prototype F-22 had its roll-out on May 11, 1997, the Cold War was nearly a decade in its grave, and it was perfectly apparent that the Soviet aircraft it was intended to match would never be built. Lockheed Martin, the F-22's prime contractor, naturally argued that we needed it anyway and made plans to sell some 438 airplanes for a total tab of $70 billion. By mid-2008, only 183 F-22s were on order, 122 of which had been delivered. The numbers had been reduced due to cost overruns. The Air Force still wants to buy an additional 198 planes, but Secretary Gates and his leading assistants have balked. No wonder. According to arms experts Bill Hartung and Christopher Preble, at more than $350 million each, the F-22 is "the most expensive fighter plane ever built."

The F-22 has several strikingly expensive characteristics which actually limit its usefulness. It is allegedly a stealth fighter -- that is, an airplane with a shape that reduces its visibility on radar -- but there is no such thing as an airplane completely invisible to all radar. In any case, once it turns on its own fire-control radar, which it must do in combat, it becomes fully visible to an enemy.

The F-22 is able to maneuver at very high altitudes, but this is of limited value since there are no other airplanes in service anywhere that can engage in combat at such heights. It can cruise at twice the speed of sound in level flight without the use of its afterburners (which consume fuel at an accelerated rate), but there are no potential adversaries for which these capabilities are relevant. The plane is obviously blindingly irrelevant to "fourth-generation wars" like that with the Taliban in Afghanistan -- the sorts of conflicts for which American strategists inside the Pentagon and out believe the United States should be preparing.

Actually, the U.S. ought not to be engaged in fourth-generation wars at all, whatever planes are in its fleet. Outside powers normally find such wars unwinnable, as the history of Afghanistan, that "graveyard of empires" going back to Alexander the Great, illustrates so well. Unfortunately, President Obama's approach to the Bush administration's Afghan War remains deeply flawed and will only entrap us in another quagmire, whatever planes we put in the skies over that country.

Nonetheless, the F-22 is still being promoted as the plane to buy almost entirely through front-loading and political engineering. Some apologists for the Air Force also claim that we need the F-22 to face the F-16. Their argument goes this way: We have sold so many F-16s to allies and Third World customers that, if we ever had to fight one of them, that country might prevail using our own equipment against us. Some foreign air forces like Israel's are fully equipped with F-16s and their pilots actually receive more training and monthly practice hours than ours do.

This, however, seems a trivial reason for funding more F-22s. We should instead simply not get involved in wars with former allies we have armed, although this is why Congress prohibited Lockheed from selling the F-22 abroad. Some Pentagon critics contend that the Air Force and prime contractors lobby for arms sales abroad because they artificially generate a demand for new weapons at home that are "better" than the ones we've sold elsewhere.

Thanks to political engineering, the F-22 has parts suppliers in 44 states, and some 25,000 people have well-paying jobs building it. Lockheed Martin and some in the Defense Department have therefore proposed that, if the F-22 is cancelled, it should be replaced by the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, also built by Lockheed Martin.

Most serious observers believe that this would only make a bad situation worse. So far the F-35 shows every sign of being, in Chuck Spinney's words, "a far more costly and more troubled turkey" than the F-22, "even though it has a distinction that even the F-22 cannot claim, namely it is tailored to meet the same threat that… ceased to exist at least three years before the F-35 R&D [research and development] program began in 1994."

The F-35 is considerably more complex than the F-22, meaning that it will undoubtedly be even more expensive to repair and will break down even more easily. Its cost per plane is guaranteed to continue to spiral upwards. The design of the F-22 involves 4 million lines of computer code; the F-35, 19 million lines. The Pentagon sold the F-35 to Congress in 1998 with the promise of a unit cost of $184 million per aircraft. By 2008, that had risen to $355 million per aircraft and the plane was already two years behind schedule.

According to Pierre M. Sprey, one of the original sponsors of the F-16, and Winslow T. Wheeler, a 31-year veteran staff official on Senate defense committees, the F-35 is overweight, underpowered, and "less maneuverable than the appallingly vulnerable F-105 'lead sled' that got wiped out over North Vietnam in the Indochina War." Its makers claim that it will be a bomber as well as a fighter, but it will have a payload of only two 2,000-pound bombs, far less than American fighters of the Vietnam era. Although the Air Force praises its stealth features, it will lose these as soon as it mounts bombs under its wings, which will alter its shape most un-stealthily.

It is a non-starter for close-air-support missions because it is too fast for a pilot to be able to spot tactical targets. It is too delicate and potentially flammable to be able to withstand ground fire. If built, it will end up as the most expensive defense contract in history without offering a serious replacement for any of the fighters or fighter-bombers currently in service.

The Fighter Mafia

Every branch of the American armed forces suffers from similar "defense power games." For example, the new Virginia-class fast-attack submarines are expensive and not needed. As the New York Times wrote editorially, "The program is little more than a public works project to keep the Newport News, Va., and Groton, Conn., naval shipyards in business."

I have, however, concentrated on the Air Force because the collapse of internal controls over acquisitions is most obvious, as well as farthest advanced, there -- and because the Air Force has a history of conflict over going along with politically easy decisions that was recently hailed by Secretary of Defense Gates as deserving of emulation by the other services. The pointed attack Gates launched on bureaucratism was, paradoxically, one of the few optimistic developments in Pentagon politics in recent times.

On April 21, 2008, the Secretary of Defense caused a storm of controversy by giving a speech to the officers of the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. In it, he singled out for praise and emulation an Air Force officer who had inspired many of that service's innovators over the past couple of generations, while being truly despised by an establishment and an old guard who viewed him as an open threat to careerism.

Colonel John Boyd (1927-1997) was a significant military strategist, an exceptionally talented fighter pilot in both the Korean and Vietnamese war eras, and for six years the chief instructor at the Fighter Weapons School at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas. "Forty-Second Boyd" became a legend in the Air Force because of his standing claim that he could defeat any pilot, foreign or domestic, in simulated air-to-air combat within 40 seconds, a bet he never lost even though he was continuously challenged.

Last April, Gates said, in part:

"As this new era continues to unfold before us, the challenge I pose to you today is to become a forward-thinking officer who helps the Air Force adapt to a constantly changing strategic environment characterized by persistent conflict.
"Let me illustrate by using a historical exemplar: the late Air Force Colonel John Boyd. As a 30-year-old captain, he rewrote the manual for air-to-air combat. Boyd and the reformers he inspired would later go on to design and advocate for the F-16 and the A-10. After retiring, he would develop the principals of maneuver warfare that were credited by a former Marine Corps Commandant [General Charles C. Krulak] and a Secretary of Defense [Dick Cheney] for the lightning victory of the first Gulf War….

"In accomplishing all these things, Boyd -- a brilliant, eccentric, and stubborn character -- had to overcome a large measure of bureaucratic resistance and institutional hostility. He had some advice that he used to pass on to his colleagues and subordinates that is worth sharing with you. Boyd would say, and I quote: 'One day you will take a fork in the road, and you're going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go. If you go one way, you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and get good assignments. Or you can go the other way and you can do something -- something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. If you decide to do something, you may not get promoted and get good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won't have to compromise yourself. To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That's when you have to make a decision. To be or to do'… We must heed John Boyd's advice by asking if the ways we do business make sense."

Boyd's many accomplishments are documented in Robert Coram's excellent biography, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. They need not be retold here. It was, however, the spirit of Boyd and "the reformers he inspired," a group within Air Force headquarters who came to be called the "Fighter Mafia," that launched the defense reform movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Their objectives were to stop the acquisition of unnecessarily complex and expensive weapons, cause the Air Force to take seriously the idea of a fourth generation of warfare, end its reliance on a strategy of attrition, and expose to criticism an officer's corps focused on careerist standards.

Unless Secretary Gates succeeds in reviving it, their lingering influence in the Pentagon is just about exhausted today. We await the leadership of the Obama administration to see which way the Air Force and the rest of the American defense establishment evolves.

Despite Gates's praise of Boyd, one should not underestimate the formidable obstacles to Pentagon reform. Over a quarter-century ago, back in 1982, journalist James Fallows outlined the most serious structural obstacle to any genuine reform in his National Book Award-winning study, National Defense. The book was so influential that at least one commentator includes Fallows as a non-Pentagon member of Boyd's "Fighter Mafia."

As Fallows then observed (pp. 64-65):

"The culture of procurement teaches officers that there are two paths to personal survival. One is to bring home the bacon for the service as the manager of a program that gets its full funding. 'Procurement management is more and more the surest path to advancement' within the military, says John Morse, who retired as a Navy captain after twenty-eight years in the service….
"The other path that procurement opens leads outside the military, toward the contracting firms. To know even a handful of professional soldiers above the age of forty and the rank of major is to keep hearing, in the usual catalogue of life changes, that many have resigned from the service and gone to the contractors: to Martin Marietta, Northrop, Lockheed, to the scores of consulting firms and middlemen, whose offices fill the skyscrapers of Rosslyn, Virginia, across the river from the capital. In 1959, Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois reported that 768 retired senior officers (generals, admirals, colonels, and Navy captains) worked for defense contractors. Ten years later Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin said that the number had increased to 2,072."

Almost 30 years after those words were written, the situation has grown far worse. Until we decide (or are forced) to dismantle our empire, sell off most of our 761 military bases (according to official statistics for fiscal year 2008) in other people's countries, and bring our military expenditures into line with those of the rest of the world, we are destined to go bankrupt in the name of national defense. As of this moment, we are well on our way, which is why the Obama administration will face such critical -- and difficult -- decisions when it comes to the Pentagon budget.

Chalmers Johnson is the author of three linked books on the crises of American imperialism and militarism. They are Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006). All are available in paperback from Metropolitan Books. To listen to a TomDispatch audio interview with Johnson on the Pentagon's potential economic death spiral, click here.

Prosecute torture crimes and send Karl Rove to jail

2009-02-03T05:37:00.002-05:00

What will Obama do?

Obama can go after the criminals who authorized torture.

He can also instruct the Justice Department to go after Karl Rove. Unprotected by Bush, Rove has a good shot at seeing jail time.

But we'll see. So far, Obama has been a good Republicrat.

Take a look at this great video I found called:

"Prosecute torture crimes and send Karl Rove to jail "

You can view it here:

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/547.html

2009-02-03T05:36:00.000-05:00